JEWISH INFLUENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE
"If
anything distinguishes American
Jews today within the context of American
society
it is the special deference
that society accords
them."
-- Charles Liebman/Stephen Cohen, p. 7
"I
have found that being Catholic
means having less status than
being Jewish. I see it
in the media, in the newspapers,
in the
intonations; I do not
see how one can avoid that feeling
or
sensibility."
--
Michael Novak, [in Stallsworth, p.
71]
"I'm
half Jewish and half nothing."
(four-year-old
boy in an elevator, to his friend),
[COWAN, P., 1987, p. 245]
"Too many Jews have turned
away from the modern project,
from
the Enlightenment and
the idea of progress, to barricade
themselves in an angry
tribalism." -- Norman Birnbaum, Tikkun,
p.
111
"The Jews in America
... have become very powerful
as a lobby and
can afford the luxury
of being hypersensitive. Any
little thing that
you say in criticism
is seen as a criticism against
the people. They
seem to want to be seen
as infallible."
-- South African Bishop
Desmond
Tutu,
Nobel Peace Prize Winner
"When Jews see themselves
as superior to all other human
beings
... they are claiming
license to do what is forbidden
to others."
-- Yehoshafat
Harkabi, former chief of
Israeli military intelligence, p.
180
"I didn't hear that polio
was cured today. I heard that
a Jewish
doctor cured polio today." -- Godfrey Cambridge, Black comedian,
SIMONS,
p. 135-136
"[Black Americans have]
an envy of the Jewish position
and an
exaggerated notion of
their power, which is standard
in the
anti-Semitic imagination."
-- Henry Feingold, Jewish scholar, p.
77
"American Jews have exerted
an extraordinary impact upon
the
character of the United
States."
--
Stephen
Whitfield, Jewish scholar,
[AMERICAN
SPACE,
p.20]
"It is all very puzzling.
Who are these people, Christians
wonder,
who have moved so rapidly
from obscurity to positions
of
prominence, even influence,
in American society ... [and]
why
do Jews seek to stick
together so much?"
-- Charles
Silberman, Jewish scholar,
p. 26
"The
period after World War II, especially,
was a time of advance.
Before
then Jews had moved into the
entertainment field, dominating
Hollywood,
and had begun to move into medicine,
the sciences,
academia,
journalism, and cultural life
in general. By the 1960s,
they
were disproportionately represented
in most professions having to
do
with
the creation or dissemination
of culture."
--
Stanley Rothman and S.
Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
1982, p. 96
"Jews in America are
a power group; is it unreasonable
for some
people to ask whether
Jews have too much power?"
-- Jerome
Chanes, Jewish scholar,
[in Weiss, p. 32]
"We Jews still
prepare ourselves to fight the
things the world
plans on doing to us.
It ain't true ... Jews are not
victims. We are
the players." -- J. J. Goldberg
[in Silverstein, B., p. 5]
Transcending religion,
race, or any other traditional
Judaic reference, modern American
Jewry is often described these
days as a voluntary (from the
perspective of the individual,
not the community, which claims
Jews by birth to the "community
of fate") polity,
a secular organizational network
with emphasis upon social, educational,
economic and political activism.
It is an organization
that unifies atheists and the
religious, rich and the less
affluent, Sephardim, Ashkenazi,
and any other self-defined "Jew"
within a communal solidarity
to Jewish "peoplehood" and its
four unifying pillars of Jewish
identity: 1) belief in a communal
identity of historic persecution
and victimhood and the uniqueness
of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust,
2) belief in the omnipresent
threat of an irrational anti-Semitism,
3) allegiance to the modern
state of Israel, and 4) a dedication
to helping others Jews.
The secular Jewish
polity is a very adjusted model
of the old obsolete "kehillah"
self-governing organization
that the Jewish community in
Europe used to mediate with
-- and distance itself from
-- the surrounding non-Jewish
people and cultures. While today's
Jewish polity is world's apart
in method and structure from
the old institution, its purpose
for existence today has moved
towards what is was in ancient
times: Jewish people distinct
from, and often at the expense
of, others. (Since the late
1960s, there has been a major
shift in fundamental American
Jewish attitudes: from helping
fellow Jews assimilate fully
into American mainstream society,
to its polar opposite: massive
amounts of money raised to support
all aspects of
"being Jewish.”) [SINGER,
p. 220] The largest and best
known expression of this polity
is the United Jewish Appeal,
an entity that has some 225
"federation'" sub-branches throughout
the country. (In 1999, the UJA
merged with other groups to
form the "United Jewish Communities.")
Such organizations claim a supportive
base of 95% of all Jews in America.
[WOOCHER] (One UJA fundraising
brochure summed up its sense
of itself by stating that "the
programs of [our] agencies ...
are not merely organizational
endeavors, even 'good works'
... they are expressions of
the essential meaning of Jewishness."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 19]) By 1980,
4,600 "key leaders" traveled
to Israel that year alone on
UJA "missions." [SILBERMAN,
p. 198]]
Still other Jewish
polity expressions (what Daniel
Elazar describes as "government-like
institutions" [ELAZAR, p. 217]
include B'nai Brith (and its
Anti-Defamation League), Haddassah,
the American Jewish Committee,
the American Jewish Congress,
the National Council for Jewish
Women, and a variety of overtly
Zionist organizations, most
linked to the American Zion
Federation. The central Jewish
lobbying organ for Israel is
the American Israel Political
Action Committee -- AIPAC. By
1982 Jewish Americans had "no
less than 340 national organizations."
[KREFETZ, p. 71] More than eighty
were expressly Zionist or other
pro-Israeli groups. [WAXMAN,
p. 134]
This modern American
Jewish polity is often noted
as a quintessential "civil religion,"
a secular belief system that
elicits deeply-felt allegiance
of religious depth and proportion.
"It has become a commonplace
in recent years," notes Peter
Novick, "that Israel and the
Holocaust are the twin pillars
of American Jewish 'civil religion'
-- the symbols that bind together
Jews in the United States whether
they are believers or nonbelievers,
on the political right, left,
or center." [NOVICK, P., 1999,
p. 147] (The modern Jewish attachment
to Judaism as a formal religion
in most of the twentieth century
has been weak. A 1971 study
revealed that only 17% of American
Jews attended religious services
more than once a month; this
was in comparison to 65% of
non-Jews who did so). [FORSTER,
p. 128] As in any religion,
the secular Jewish polity beliefs
are articles of faith. They
need not make logical sense
to an outside observer; even
some of its adherents may recognize
-- and struggle to resolve --
various incongruencies, paradoxes,
and hypocrisies in its central
tenets. As the Random House
dust jacket blurb noted for
James Yaffe's 1968 volume The
American Jews: Portrait of a
Split Personality, "no people
on earth are more riddled by
contradictions than the American
Jews." [YAFFE, 1968]
These inconsistencies
largely stem from Jewish attempts
to rationalize their traditional
(and current) notions of their
exalted selves as the Chosen
People in the context of a modern
western society that socializes
against such chauvinism, a pan-human
perspective that most Jews themselves
give public lip service. Jewish
reluctance to surrender, however,
(whatever form of) their self-perceived
hereditary specialness as central
to Jewish identity has created
for some a lingering moral and
psychological dilemma, one that
the Jewish polity resolves by
dissimulation and/or equivocation,
by enforcing the preposterous
and paradoxical Jewish myth
that it is Jewish chauvinistic
exceptionality itself that created
the notion of pan-human universality.
"[The Jewish polity believes
that] America is, after all,
created in their [Jewish] image,"
says Jonathan Woocher, "and
in pursuing the civil Jewish
version of Jewish destiny, they
are merely reinforcing the terms
of America's own understanding."
[WOOCHER, p. 102]
"Whether Jews
define themselves as 'just Jewish,'
'ethnic Jews,' 'nonreligious
Jews,' or some other phrase
that classified them as more
assimilated," noted Gary Tobin
in 1988, "most know that they
are different from other Americans....
[TOBIN, p. 70] ... For most
Jews, there continues to be
a 'them' and an 'us,' even though
the 'us' is in some ways part
of the 'them' ... [TOBIN, p.
73] ... The majority of American
Jews continue to struggle to
maintain their separate identity."
[TOBIN, p. 74] "Despite their
strong desire for integration
into American society," wrote
Nathan Glazer in 1972, "Jews
do not, on the whole intermarry
and do maintain themselves apart.
How to resolve this contradiction
is one of the major dilemmas
of Judaism in America." [GLAZER,
p. 10]
This "contradiction"
is clearly manifest in the very
principles of Jewish identity
that are diametrically opposed
to the founding principles of
Americanism. As Adam Garfinkle
observes:
"The principle of individualist
equality that flows from American
sacred texts and the
American experience cannot be
reconciled with
the hierarchical, communal
principle that flows from halakhah,
Jewish religious law.
Many try and some claim success,
but
'success' is mere illusion.
Most American Jews have two
religions
the way some men have
one wife and one mistress, or
some women
one husband and one lover.
It is a condition that can be
managed,
learned from, even enjoyed,
some times for long periods.
But it can
never be brought to true
reconciliation." [GARFINKLE,
p. 4]
After
a 1950s survey of American
Jews, researcher Joseph Adelson
noted the "confusion" some
Jews had in grappling with
stereotypes about Jews that
seemed to them to be true,
all centering on the contradictions
of Jewish identity and "self-hatred"
(i.e., self-criticism):
"It should be emphasized
that the nonauthoritarian
[a 1950s-era term for the
non-prejudiced] are not free
from conflicts and confusions
about being Jewish;
indeed, they frequently seem
more disturbed than do the
authoritarian [i.e.,
"prejudiced" Jews who put
stock in some stereotypes],
in part because of a
lesser rigidity of defense
and in part because their
political beliefs are often
at
variance with underlying feelings
concerning Jewishness [the
human universalist/Jewish
chauvinist tension].
It is doubtful whether many
individuals, Jewish or Gentile,
can completely
avoid incorporating our society's
stereotype of the Jew. The
point is
that the authoritarian Jew
accepts the stereotype and
recasts it to meet the
circumstance of his Jewishness;
the nonauthoritarian Jew rejects
its validity,
fights its existence within
himself, and is sometimes
ridden by guilt when he
unable to do so completely."
[ADLESON, J., 1960, p. 479]
Zalman
Posner, in championing the
Orthodox Chabad Lubavitcher
religious world view and bemoaning
the fact that there are too
many secular Jews who have
been misguided by concepts
of human universalism, addresses
the religious root in the
conflict between "Christian"
identity and Jewry's traditionally
separatist, and intolerant,
core:
"I
suggest that the American
Jew conceives of religion
and discusses it in
Christian
terms. He grapples with religious
difficulties, because
a
Jew must examine Judaism,
but he does so with Christian
categories. His conflict
is
not necessarily a Jewish one,
but one of reconciling divergent
viewpoints,
the
Jewish and the Christian,
that were never intended to
be reconciled, for
they
represent thoroughly different
values." [POSNER, Z., p. 31]
Stephen
Steinlight, a former American
Jewish Committee official,
observes that
"Jews
regularly identify with 'belief
in social justice' as the
second most important
factor
in their Jewish identity;
it is trumped only by a 'sense
of peoplehood.' It also
explains
the long Jewish involvement
in and flirtation with Marxism.
But it is
fair
to say that Jewish universalistic
tendencies and tribalism have
always existed
in
an uneasy dialectic. We are
at once the most open of peoples
and one second
to
none in intensity of national
feeling. Having made this
important distinction, it
must be admitted that
the essence of the process
of my [Jewish] nationalist
training
was
to inculcate the belief that
the primary division in the
world was between 'us'
and 'them.' Of course
we also saluted the American
and Canadian flags and sang
those
anthems, usually with real
feeling, but it was clear
where our primary loyalty
was meant
to reside." [STEINLIGHT, S.,
OCTOBER 2001]
"The
American Jew,"says Charles
Liebman, "is torn between
two sets of values -- those
of integration and acceptance
into American society and
those of Jewish group survival.
Those values appear to me
to be incompatible." [LIEBMAN,
C., THE AMBIVALENT ..., p.
vii; QUOTED IN O'BRIEN, 2000]
As Paul Cowan once underscored
about his renewed Jewish identity,
and the distinctness
between that and being American:
"Until 1976, when I was thirty-six,
I had always identified as
an American Jew. Now I am
an American and a Jew. I live
at once in the years 1982
and 5743, the Jewish year
in which I am publishing this
book." [COWAN, P., 1982, p.
3]
"Every prayer and
ritual observance in Judaism,”
says Arthur Koestler, "proclaims
membership to an ancient race,
which automatically separates
the Jew from the racial and
historic past of the people
whose midst he lives." [KOESTLER,
p. 287] "Above all," says rabbi Jonathan Sacks,
"the otherness of Jewish law
as something given by God and
interpreted by authoritative
rabbis runs counter to the fundamental
thought of modernity." [SACKS,
J. p. 157] "Traditional views
of the Gentile and the fear
of anti-Semitism persist," wrote
Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen
in 1990, ".... This sense of
estrangement from the non-Jew
and fear of the non-Jew remain
not only for Israelis and not
only for those most deeply committed
to the Jewish tradition." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 40]
Edward
Bernard Glick notes his people's
tradtional identity like this:
"The
Jewish people (as the
American dictionary calls them),
dos yiddische folk
(as
Yiddish speakers refer to themselves),
and am yisrael or ha'am
ha'yehudi
(as
Hebrew speakers refer to the
concept) denote a transnational,
multilingual,
historical,
and religious group which professes
a oneness, a unity, a whole,
a
solidarity,
and a partnership that predates
by millenia the modern Jewish
state.
The
concept applies to all Jews
in the world, whether they realize
it or not,
whether
they want it or not, and whether
they they like it or not. For
Jewish
peoplehood
is Judaism, which is
a religion in the gentile sense.
And the proof
of
this is that no other religious
group in the world so steadily
and so steadfastly
calls
itself a people. Do the multifarous
denominations of American Protestantism,
concerned as they may
be with the fate of foreign
Protestants, call themselves
the Methodist
people, the Baptist people,
the Episcopalian people, or
the Presbyterian
people?
Do American Catholics ... call
themselves the Catholic people,
even though catholic
is a synonym for universal?
Do American Muslims, American
Hindus, and American
Buddhists use the word in reference
to their creeds? No." [GLICK,
E., 1982,
p. 125]
As large numbers
of Jews left the hearts of big
cities over the years, in 1959
Rabbi Albert Gordon's study
called Jews in Suburbia
noted that "Jews seldom come
to know non-Jews any better
in suburbia than they did in
the big city ... To what extent
is this condition the result
of Jewish self-segregation?
Scrutinizing each of the communities
in this study with this question
in mind, I discovered first
of all that ... their closest
friendships are reserved for
other Jews who have the same
community, class, synagogual
and organizational interests.
This primary friendship is natural
-- and characteristic of every
kind of suburb." [GORDON, A.,
p. 170]
Arthur Hertzberg notes
that in post-World War II America,
"even those Jews who affirmed
neither religious nor ethnic
identity admitted that they
were most comfortable with other
Jews. Even the most 'anti-Jewish'
Jews reported that at least
four out of five of their friends
were Jews. This was true even
of people of Jewish origin who
had converted to one of the
branches of Christianity. Jewish
businessmen and professionals
... did business much of the
time with Americans of all origins
and persuasions. They lunched
often with their customers or
clients, but they went home
to have dinner and play cards,
or to play golf on weekends,
or to go to the theater or symphony,
with other Jews." [HERTZBERG,
A., 1989, p. 325]
"In one study," noted
Susan Schneider in the 1980s,
"78% of the Jews (as compared
to 14% of Protestants) say that
they have 'regular interactions'
with at least five households
of [their] relatives. What may
be a uniquely Jewish way of
keeping the kinship ties is
the 'cousins' club,' meeting
regularly to create family networks
that reinforce every member's
sense of belonging, of having
a reference group or 'home room'
even in adulthood." [SCHNEIDER,
p. 265] "Jews appear to be,
by origin and authentic nature,
a tribe," says Jewish author
Eric Kahler, "a primordial social
structure and hence, in spite
of their dispersion the closest
related of historical communities,
closer related among each other
than the locally associated
members of a modern nation."
[KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 10-11]
By scholarly -- or
any other -- accounts, the Jewish
tradition of a clannish collectivism
and communal self-promotive
unity -- religiously or otherwise
-- endures for most Jews today.
"The American Jewish community
is cohesive," wrote Alan Zuckerman
in 1991, "... Because most American
Jews occupy distinctive niches
in the general social, economic,
and political structure of the
United States, each Jew makes
decisions about friends, husband
or wife, neighbors, workmates,
and political associates from
a set of persons, most of whom
are Jews... [ZUCKERMAN, p. 15]
... The ties of residential
concentration and social class
place the American Jewish community
into a distinctive niche in
the general society." [ZUCKERMAN,
p. 22] "The community of class
and status among Jews," says
Calvin Goldscheider, [and] occupational
concentration and educational
achievement at high levels [results]
in [Jewish] social bonds, economic
networks, and common lifestyles
and interests ... [GOLDSCHEIDER,
p. 135].. . The common assumption
that increased levels of education
and occupation would lead to
assimilation of the American
Jewish community [into mainstream
society] ... seems to be unfounded.
An examination of the empirical
evidence has pointed to the
very opposite conclusion. The
uniqueness of the stratification
profile and the distinctive
social mobility patterns of
American Jews mark Jews off
from others and binds Jews to
each other." [GOLDSCHEIDER,
p. 136]
"The commonality of class
and status among Jews," agrees
Esther Wilder, "is distinctive
and results in social bonds,
economic networks, common lifestyles
and interests." [WILDER, 6-96]
"In America as elsewhere,"
noted Benjamin Ginsberg in 1994,
"... Jews are outsiders who
are often more successful than
their hosts ... And, to make
matters worse, Jews often, secretly
or not so secretly, conceive
themselves to be morally and
intellectually superior to their
neighbors." [GINZBURG, p. 8]
"To be a Jew," wrote Eugene
Borowitz in the 1970s," means
to have a bond with every other
Jew -- and somehow know how
to find him." [SILBERMAN, p.
76] "In social intercourse
with other Jews," says Theodore
Reik, "informality and familiarity
form a kind of inner security,
a 'we-feeling.' They know each
other and there are not many
things which need to be explained.
Meeting and speaking with other
Jews is accompanied by the feeling
that they are 'my kind of people.'
It is what [Sigmund] Freud calls
'the clear awareness of an inner
identity, the secret of the
same inner construction.'" [REIK,
T., 1962, p. 228-229]
Early in his acting
career, Marlon Brando recalls
walking with a Jewish friend
in New York City:
"There was a woman
in front of us with blond hair
wearing a mink
coat and we were talking
about her, when Caroline said,
'She's
Jewish.' I asked,
'How do you know?' She answered,
'Well, it's
because ... I don't
know, she's just Jewish.' I
said, 'You mean to
say, just because
she has blond hair and a mink
--" She interrupted,
'Look, I'm a Jew,
and I know what Jews are like
from the front,
back, side or top.'
'Well, how can you tell a Jew
from a non-Jew?'
She replied, 'Well,
you have to be Jewish to know
that.' I was
stunned, and I thought
Caroline had remarkable powers
of
perception." [BRANDO/LINDSEY,
1994, p. 75]
Erich Kahler recalls
and incident involving a fellow
Jew (poet Richard Beer-Hofmann)
in Berlin:
"His face was wrapped
in a woolen scarf [against the
cold] so that
only his eyes could
be seen. An old orthodox Jew
in his caftan came
down the stairs and
stopped him. 'The gentleman
is one of us (Der
Herr ist einer von
uns),' he said to Beer-Hofmann,
'he will tell me
how I can get to the
Nollendorfplatz.' The eyes alone
were enough
to reveal a Jew to
a Jew." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p.
6]
Former
New York Times Executive
Editor Max Frankel notes the
following in his autobiography:
"The best reporters and editors
normally have no race, sex,
or religion. They
may charm or muscle their way
into strange places, but they
try not to THINK
male or female, black or Jewish.
Still, there always comes a
time for exceptions.
I remember reliving the shudders
of refugee life at the sight
of Hungarians trudging across
a frozen frontier swamp. I never
totally banished that twinge
of smug American security
when interviewing high-ranking
Germans. And there's no denying
the conspiratorial
bond that suddenly appeared
when an old man on a park bench
in Kiev whispered,
BIST AH YID? Are you a
Jew? was a question often put
to me, and
with decidedly different inflections.
In Communist countries, it came
from Jews
who meant thereby to ask whether
they could trust me with seditious
conversation.
In Israel, it was asked to discover
whether I would ever put my
feelings for the Jewish state
ahead of my journalistic mission.
Now that I had charge of editorials
at the Times,
the question was usually hurled
with contempt; I was obviously
a Jew, but
in
the eyes of many Jews, an unworthy
one for daring to criticize
the Israeli government.
So whenever I turned to the
subject of Israel, there was
no escaping
my skin." [FRANKEL, M., 1999,
p. 397]
"Jewish civilization
should have vanished a long
time ago," says Henry Feingold,
"that it did not and does not
may also be part of Jewish exceptionalism.
It may well be that Judaism
is governed by different rules
... Jews are a subgroup in this
dynamic society; but they are
also more Jewish, as measured
by the concern for Jewish people
throughout the world." [FEINGOLD,
p. 52] "90% [of American Jews]
claim to feel 'very close' or
'fairly close' to other Jews,"
noted Alan Zuckerman in 1991,
" ... Even when they select
non-Jews [as spouses and friends],
most Jews have strong ties which
pull them back to the Jewish
community." [ZUCKERMAN, p. 27]
"The Jews," noted Jonathan Rieder
in his study of Jews and Italians
in a section of Brooklyn, "had
a pronounced feeling of ethnic
honor, another sign of their
willingness to invest in loyalties
beyond the nuclear family. The
articulateness of Jewish identity,
and the capacity for immersion
in the collective experience
of Jewish suffering, ran contrary
to the muteness of Canarasie
Italians about their ethnicity."
[REIDER, J., 1985, p. 46]
In 1993
Joel Kotkin noted that "an estimated
50 per cent or more of American
Jews send their children to
an ethnic school, and over three-quarters
of young men undergo the traditional
bar mitzvah ceremony. In contrast,
counterpart systems promoting
specifically Italian or German
language, culture, and history
largely have disappeared in
most major countries of immigration.
Even among inter-married couples
... a large majority claim that
most of their friends were Jews."
[KOTKIN, p. 35] In 1988 eight
of ten American Jews still participated
in some sort of yearly Passover
ritual. [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 6] One study
showed that as late as the 1970s,
"96% of American Jews only had
Jewish relatives, 77% had all
their closest friends as Jews,
60% belonged to Jewish community
organizations, virtually all
of them gave to Jewish charities,
and 90% felt a strong attachment
to Israel." [FORSTER, p. 129]
In a 1982 study of
the American Jewish community,
"61% of the respondents reported
that 'all,' 'almost all,' or
'most' of their friends were
Jewish. "About two-thirds of
American Jews still form their
closest friendships with other
Jews," noted Stephen Whitfield
in 1988, "The process of acculturation
may have blurred distinctions
between Jews and their gentile
neighbors, but a sense of peoplehood
has not been entirely suppressed."
[WHITFIELD, AM, p. 6] In 1988 Gary Tobin could still write
that "a study of the Jewish
population of New York City
found 70% of respondents saying
that all of their three close
friends are Jewish." [TOBIN,
p. 69] In a 1990 survey of American
Jews, 60% selected the statement
"I see the Jewish people as
an extension of my family";
only 23% disagreed. 74% agreed
that "As a Jew I have a special
responsibility to help other
Jews"; only 14% disagreed. [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 18] (Jews in Russia?
Jewish scholar Zvi Gitelman
in 1994 "found that Jews overwhelmingly
reported that their closest
friends were Jewish." [SACKS,
M., 1998, p. 264]
"No matter where I
was," says Ze'ev Chafets, about
his travels across America in
1986, "-- in a Jewish farm town
in New England or a black synagogue
in Queens, in a gay temple in
San Francisco or among the Jews
of the Louisiana bayou -- I
always felt at home. I came
to the United States feeling
like an Israeli; I left reminded
that I am also, as a friend
in Detroit put it, an MOT --
a Member of the Tribe." [CHAFETS,
MEMBERS, p. 8-9]
Stephen
Bloom notes his enduring Jewish
identity this way:
"Despite
the lack of Jewish worship and
observance, and my family's
total
assimilation
into everything American and
secular, we were thoroughly
Jewish
as
was our very essence. The world
was split into two distinct
halves: Jews
and
gentiles. Jews were always sought
in business or social dealings
over
gentiles.
A common expresion used by Jews
to describe a slow, dense
person was -- and still
is -- 'He's got a goyisher
kop,' which literally means
'He's
got a gentile head' but figuratively
means 'slow-witted.' First question
when
I came home and boasted of making
a new friend was 'Is he Jewish?'
'God
forbid!' (my father's expression)
if I should ever go out with
a gentile
girl,
and 'Oy vey!' (which literally
means 'Oh, pain!') if I ever
got serious
with
her. All my parents' friends
were Jews." [BLOOM, S., 2001,
p. 63]
"This clannishness, as it
appears to others," says Charles
Silberman, "is rooted in the
sense of destiny that Jews the
world over share with one another
-- a destiny that has some transcendent
(and transcendental) significance."
[SILBERMAN, p. 76] ("The destiny
of the Jewish people," writes
Jean Francois Steiner, " ...
no earthly power has ever been
able to defeat." [HOWE, p. 445])
This clustering, in the largest
sense, has a very geographical
flavor; over 95% of American
Jews congregate in cities and
nearby suburbs; in fact, 80%
of them live in only ten population
centers -- New York City and
Los Angeles are the two largest.
[WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 6] A
third of all American Jews live
in the New York-New Jersey area.
[SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 5] (City-wise,
by 1999, the greater Miami Jewish
population, about 653,000 people,
ranked second only behind New
York City). [BELKIN, D., 5-6-99]
Linking modern Jewish American
geography to their roots in
a separatist ghetto past, in
1978 Nachum Goldmann added that
"even today Jews have a tendency
to live in a neighborhood of
their own, in an environment
that facilitates the life of
their community." [GOLDMANN,
N., 1978, p. 66] [Click here for world geography
of the Jews] (American Jews
are overwhelmingly of Eastern
European background. By the
late 1950s, more than four-fifths
were estimated to be of Eastern
European descent). [GRINSTEIN,
H., 1959, p. 73]
In London, England, the Jewish Chronicle noted
in 2002 the results of a local
survey:
"London Jews also like to be
near other Jews. More than 97
per cent in North and North
West London say they know of
another Jewish resident in the
same street, while more than
half (two-thirds in the North
West) have a next-door Jewish
neighbor. More than 80 per cent
in the North East, and more
than 90 per cent in the North
West, have a Jewish neighbour
within three doors away." [JEWISH
CHRONICLE, 12-6-02, p. 31]
[Note: South London percentages are much, much
smaller -- poorer part of town?]
Decades earlier,
the descendants of other peoples
who had immigrated to America
with the last major Jewish wave
had already assimilated into
American culture. In 1964, Arthur
Hertzberg was noting that "the
grandchildren of the Italians,
the Slavs and the rest have
become completely assimilated
culturally ... The ... European
immigrants of the last century
have failed to provide Jews
with a parallel for their devotion
to some continuity for their
own subculture." [HERTZBERG,
p. 287]
James
Yaffe notes that
"In 1962 AJC
[the American Jewish Committee]
studied the Jewish
community in
Baltimore and came to these
conclusions: Jewish
employees are
much more likely to work for
Jewish employers;
although most
Jews claim they don't care what
religion their doctor
or lawyer professes,
they nevertheless use Jewish
doctors 95 percent
of the time
and Jewish lawyers 87 percent
of the time; the great majority
of them say
that it doesn't matter to them
if their children go to a school
that has only
Jewish pupils in it -- yet 90
percent send their children
to
schools which
are predominantly Jewish." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 65]
In 1973, Harry Golden noted
that:
"Affluence and the census
explain two of the obvious characteristics
of Jewish mobility: when
Jews move, they all move at
once and they
all want to move to the
same place. For Jews want the
enclave. They
cluster." [GOLDEN, H., 1973,
p. 43]
This clustering has
a transnational flavor. As Harold
Troper noted about the Jews
of Canada in 1999:
"Even today, no other
ethnic group in Canada is as
institutionally
complete, nor does
any other group have a comparable
degree of
communal self-awareness,
as measured by knowledge of
organizations
and leaders, voluntarism
and reading of the ethnic press,
community
fund raising, and
individual self-identification.
Compared to most other
groups, and certainly
compared to other ethno-European
groups, Jews
are a highly identified,
unassimilated group ... Many
Jews in Canada
demonstrate a deeply
held feeling of mutual interdependence
and
transnational identification
with Jews everywhere that defies
any
explanation." [TROPER,
H., 1999, p. 228, 232]
This
is what the Jewish Chronicle
noted about London Jews, as
reported by the Institute for
Jewish Policy Research, in 2002:
"80 per cent had watched a programme
of Jewish interest [in the past
year], 53 per cent had read
a book on a Jewish topic, while
just 10 per cent had not participated
in any kind Jewish cultural
activity or bought a piece of
Judaica of any kind. A third
had attended a Jewish lecture,
and one in five a synagogue
adult-education programme; 24
per cent had been to a Jewish
film, theatre or music event;
and 24 per cent had visited
a Jewish museum outside the
UK. Around 60 per cent had been
to at least one Jewish educational
or cultural event ... More than
half of those surveyed had done
some type of voluntary work
for their synagogue or another
Jewish organisation in the past
year ... As many as 13 per cent
had served as a trustee on a
Jewish charit ... Forty-six
per cent attached highest priority
to Jewish causes in the UK;
20 per cent to general British
charities; 14 per cent to Israel;
and 11 per cent equally to Jewish
and Israeli charities [i.e.,
noted that 71% of Jews placed
higher priority on Judeo-centric
welfare over pan-British welfare,
which received only a 20% priority
figure] ... 'What is absolutely
apparent,' the report comments,
'is that London Jews have long
sinced ceased to comprise a
religious group. They are truly
an ethnie (ethnic group) within
British society, with shared
historical memories, a myth
of common ancestry ... and an
overall sense of solidarity
... More than 90 per cent think
it important for their children
to mix with in Jewish social
groups, and 89 per cent are
willing to send their children
on an Israel trip -- an "amazingly
high" figure, the report notes,
given the conflict in the Middle
East." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 12-6-02,
p. 31]
Jonathan Woocher,
in his volume about the Jewish
American polity, notes that:
"The civil religion knows that
the goals of Jewish group survival
and social integration [with
mainstream American society]
are indeed in tension. Civic
Judaism's world view and ethos
in fact incorporates a host
of assertions which are potentially
contradictory." These include
the Jewish insistence that they
are "under siege" while they
enjoy unprecedented freedom,
prosperity, and opportunity
in America, the notion that
all Jews are "one people" when
in fact they are -- in modern
times -- as diverse as any other
group in every possible manner
(except perhaps, throughout
most of the world, for their
usual similarities in relatively
high income and social status),
the idea that the modern state
of Israel is their "home" when
they have perfectly fine homes
here (indeed, homes that are
even "safer" than the Jewish
ones overseas), the common secular
Jewish belief that Judaism's
distinctive ideals are social
justice, equality, et al when
mainstream American society's
ideals are (and have always
been since the founding of the
nation) no different, and the
expending of so much time, energy,
and money on themselves as Jews
(much of it internationally)
when
the American social contract
expects a foremost Jewish
responsibility to their fellow
Americans (or simply fellow
humans) as equal members of
the American polity.
"Civic Judaism," notes Woocher,
"is ... a religion of thorough-going
ambivalence, of paradox, and
inconsistency." [WOOCHER, p.
98]
We might also add the
fact that Jews portray themselves
always as victims, when they
are in fact the wealthiest and
most influential ethnic group
in America.
While, David
Davis, a Jewish professor at
Yale can, like most American
Jews, completely mythologize
Jewish history as "a testing
ground for American ideals,
especially the ideal of apportioning
rewards according to individual
merit as opposed to hereditary
privilege or ethnic identity,"
[DAVIS, D., p. 27] another Jewish
professor, Adam Garfinkel, states
more honestly, and bluntly,
that "the underlying harmony
between Jewish and American
values vanishes upon close inspection."
[GARFINKLE, p 5]
Concerned about
his peoples' modern schizophrenic
identity, Jewish scholar Jacob
Neusner wrote:
"Why American Jews sustain
the contradictory position of
deeming
the state of Israel to
be critical to their own existence
as a distinctive,
self-sustaining group
in American society, and also
insisting that
they and their future
find permanent place within
American society,
has to be worked out.
Here is a strange civil religion
... What is
puzzling is not that
political events -- the destruction
of a group, the
formation of a national
state -- should generate dislocation
in society
and so in people's imagination.
It is that the state of dislocation
should be made into a
permanent and, if truth be told,
normative
condition of a group."
[NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 3]
Among the most
disturbing paradoxes, however
(one not lost to many Jews,
but rarely addressed publicly)
is the one that James Madison
foresaw in the very establishing
of the American constitution.
In a free society of competing
ideas and interests, there is
always the inevitable danger
that a powerful "faction" (or factions) could successfully coagulate
to disbalance the fullest expression
of pluralistic opinion and subvert
the idealized democratic process.
The obvious example of this
is the innocent "one person,
one vote" democratic principle
which is a trivial cosmetic
to hide the powerful economic
interests that function offstage
where real
political power, influence,
and decision-making lies. Ironically,
in the honing of the modern
liberal American state of multicultural
and pluralistic tolerance (which
Jews were influential in demanding,
to the letter of the law, in
recent decades) the conditions
were established whereby American
Jewry could launch itself as
a minority "superpower," to
the inevitable detriment of
others in the American social
experiment, Arabs, and those
in other parts of the Third
World, and at the expense of
the very pluralistic ideals
which Jews have exploited to
chauvinist ends. In the American
cultural tradition of "rugged
individualism," the relentless
Jewish collectivist entity --
economic, political, and social
-- could, and is, vanquishing
all foes in its aim of Jewish
exclusionist allegiances, an
aim that ironically seeks to
bend the full American polity
to the Jewish exclusionist will.
This aim has thus far been successful,
especially per American popular
views toward the modern state
of Israel. Part of the strategy
(intentionally or de facto)
is to weaken all competing unification
efforts by potentially larger
non-Jewish polities; numerically
weaker ones (i.e., "minorities")
have served as Jewish allies
in so far as the Jewish polity
may lead them to expressly Jewish
goals and benefits. In recent
history other American ethnic
groups -- particularly Blacks
-- have rebelled against Jewish
hegemony in the modern contesting
tribal battles called multiculturalism,
which Jews were instrumental
in creating to protect their
own "particularism."
Indeed, the modern
American milieu of "cultural
pluralism" (laid bare, the celebration
of ethnic ethnocentrism as a
foundation of the American cultural
milieu) affords the American
Jewish community the safest
framework for its own expression
of global Jewish nationalism.
Zionism, the modern secular
ideology of transnational Jewish
allegiance (a hard-core political creed and not merely
a champion of Jewish "culture"),
owes much of its success to
its careful nurturing amidst
America's Jewry and American
society at-large. An Israeli
professor of history, Allon
Gal, notes that
"A major characteristic
of American Zionist ideology
is its acceptance
of the
concept that has become known
as 'cultural pluralism' ...
This
philosophy
... has typified American Zionist
thought since the early
twentieth
century ... True, the focus
of Zionist interest has been
on
building
an autonomous Jewish community
in Palestine. But the
successful
development of the Jewish community
in America and its
constructive
relationship with the pluralistic
society at large have always
loomed
large in American Zionist thought
and deed. Living in
democratic
and pluralistic America, Zionists looked
for a general
American rationale for creating
the Jewish state against many
heavy
odds."
[GAL, p. 20]
"Pluralism," remarks
Kevin MacDonald, "serves internal
Jewish [American] interests
because it legitimizes the internal
Jewish interests in rationalizing
and openly advocating an interest
in Jewish group commitments
and non-assimilation." [MCDONALD,
INVOLVEMENT, p. 296] The Jew
in America, warned Israel's
first prime minister David Ben
Gurion, "faces death by a kiss
-- a slow and imperceptible
decline into the abyss of assimilation."
[WEYL, N., 1968, p 293-294]
"Solomon Schechter," noted Allon
Gal, "the chief architect of
Conservative Judaism [one of
the major branches of the faith
today], supported Zionism in
1906 mainly 'as the great bulwark
against assimilation.'" [GAL,
A., 1986, p. 376]
Jews
have been the foremost activists
in molding public institutions
and opinon towards what is
today called "political correctness,"
intergroup "tolerance," the
celebration of ethnic differences,
and and multiculturalism.
"While the intergroup relations
field included representatives
of various racial, religious,
and ethnic communities," notes
Stuart Svonkin,
"Jewish
organizations played the leading
role indefining the movements
tactics and
objectives.
Among the Jewish agencies
that became involved in intergroup
relations,
the American Jewish Committee
(AJC), the Anti-Defamation
League
of
B'nai B'rith (ADL), and the
American Jewish Congress (AJC)
were the most
active
and influiential. These three
national secular agencies
aspired to function
as
the Jewish community's department
of state formulating and implementing
policies
to shape American Jewry's
relations with other American
communities
...
The AJCongress explicitly
favored cultural pluralism
and strongly supported
Jewish
nationalism. These two commitments
were closely connected; Horace
Kallen,
who deveoped the theory of
cultural pluralism, was himself
an
ardent
champion of both the AJCongress
and American Zionism."
[SVONKIN,
S., 1997, p. 1, 23]
This man, Kallen,
most credited with the conception
and development of cultural
pluralism (the ethnocentric vehicle by which Zionism
could unobjectionably thrive
in the United States) was an
American Jewish professor, most
active in the teens and 1920s. He argued a sharp distinction between
"nationality" (being Jewish)
and "citizenship" (being American).
[SCHMIDT, p. 38] One author
calls Kallen "the grandfather
of multiculturalism;" his important
collection of essays was entitled
Culture and Democracy in
the United States. "Although
the ideas contained within it
had little impact at the time,"
says John Miller, "they became
enormously influential later
in the century. Horace Kallen
was the first multiculturalist."
[MILLER, p. 80]
Kallen was also so
great a Zionist that he was
the "leader and guiding spirit"
of "an elite secret society
called the Parushim, the Hebrew
word for 'Pharisee' and 'separatist.'"
[GROSE, p. 54, 53]
"You will be subject,"
stated the inductor in the Parushim
swearing-in ceremony, "to an
absolute duty whose call you
will be impelled to heed at
any time, in any place, and
at any cost." [SCHMIDT, p. 77]
Kallen wrote to the prominent
German Zionist, Max Nordeau,
in 1914, saying, "[I] t happened
to be my turn to lead the secret
organization here in America
which is aiming to turn the
Zionist movement in a political
direction, from within. Our
order is called Parushim ...
Our present purpose is one of
quiet propaganda and education
in 'the political idea' ...
It is our desire and plan to
organize brotherhoods all over
the world." [SCHMIDT, p. 79]
"[A]n organization which has
the aims we have," Kallen wrote
to a fellow American Zionist
leader, "must work silently,
and through education and infection
rather than through force and
noise." [SCHMIDT, p. 83]
Under great influence
of Kallen's thinking was a Jewish
United States Supreme Court
Justice, Louis Brandeis (who
was also the eventual director
of the Federation of American
Zionists). "Certainly Kallen
wished to 'instruct' Brandeis,"
notes Sarah Schmidt, "and perhaps,
covertly, even to manipulate
him. But Kallen's preference
was for the role of anonymous,
self-effacing string puller."
[SCHMIDT, p. 85]
"Against those powerful
Jews who argued that a Jewish
nationalism was unpatriotic
and seditious," notes Kevin
Avruch, "Brandeis put forth
the contrary notion: 'Zionism
is the Pilgrim inspiration and
impulse over again.'" [AVRUCH,
K., 1981, p. 30]
Using the idea of
cultural pluralism to buttress
his Zionist arguments, Horace
Kallen, notes David Levering
Lewis, "rejected assimilation
and proposed instead that Jews
retain their 'racial' uniqueness,
the better to enrich American
society." [HERTZBERG, p. 283, LEWIS p. 553] Henry Feingold notes that:
"Writing
in the definitive Harvard
Encyclopedia of American Ethnic
Groups,
Philip Gleason finds a 'racialist'
dimension in Kallen's
approach
to the pluralism idea and suggests
that the number of Jewish
thinkers
attracted to the notion -- Franz
Boas, Mordecai Kaplan, and
others
-- has the earmarks of a Jewish
intellectual conspiracy to create
space
for a Jewish culture. There
may be some truth in that idea
... The
legitimacy
of Zionism would not have been
established without the
ideological
rationale put forward by the
cultural pluralists."
[FEINGOLD, p. 54]
Kallen wrote that
"[human associations] have constituted
communities tending to preserve
and to sustain the continuity
of the physical stock. Empirically,
race is nothing more than this
continuity confirmed and enchanneled
in basic social inheritances.
It is hardly distinguishable
from nationality." [in MILLER,
J., p. 84]
He also asserted that
"men may change their clothes,
their politics, their wives,
their religions, their philosophies,
to a greater or less extent;
they cannot change their grandfathers."
[BIALE, D., 1998, p. 25] Elsewhere,
Kallen addressed the idea of
anti-Semitism as the veritable
foundation of Jewish identity:
"Anti-Semitism imposes a unity
upon Jews whether they like
it or not ... Only by working
together may each be better
defended than if he worked alone.
This fact should guide Jewish
education ... It has to recognize
that Jews are members of one
another; that each Jew carries
a responsibility, not only as
an individual but as a member
of a group called Jews." [KALLEN,
1954, p. 188-189]
Working for decades
for acceptance in American society
at-large, many Jews have even
deceptively championed -- for
popular consumption -- Judeo-centric Zionism, however incongruously,
as a universalistic
creed. As Allon Gal observes
"American Zionist
thinkers emphasized the non-nationalist
or
'higher' social and
ethical goals as the fulfillment
of Zionism;
the rationale of Zionism
was perceived as it service
to the
betterment of mankind.
In pure form this ideology held
that
serving the human
race was the only, or the chief
test of
Zionism." [GAL, 1986,
p. 363]
The notion of a "mission" to serve humanity
(although there is absolutely
no evidence that Zionism has
ever benefited anyone on earth
but Jews) blended well with
American democratic ideals and
self-conceptions. With the acceptance
of cultural pluralism and its
institution into the American
social fabric, notes Peter Grose,
"the way lay open ... to link
Jewish group identity, through
Zionism, to the American Dream."
[GROSE, p. 55] "Once Kallen
became convinced that the American
Zionist movement was developing
in accord with his ideas," notes
Sarah Schmidt, "he began to
use his contacts with the non-Jewish
media as 'propagandists' for
the Zionist cause." [SCHMIDT,
p. 93]
(By World War II,
Zionist propagandistic activities
had enormously grown and accelerated.
As Zionist historian Melvin
Urofsky notes: "The Zionists,
throughout the war period, carefully
cultivated Christian America.
From a standpoint of practical
politics alone, the Zionists
recognized that only if the
larger community supported their
aims would they be able to influence
government policy. A minority,
no matter how effacious its
propaganda or skillful public
relations, no matter how many
important contacts it has made,
cannot affect American foreign
policy unless it either neutralizes
the majority or wins it over
to active support of its cause."
[UROFSKY, 1978, p. 35] )
Yet even an American
environment of mutually tolerant
ethnicities is not what traditional
Jewish identity really seeks.
Zionism is not only interested
in "foreign policy." As Arthur
Hertzberg wrote in a B'nai B'rith
publication in 1964:
"[Cultural
pluralism] has not ... succeeded
in achieving its very patent
'Jewish'
purpose, to reorganize America
in such a fashion that all of
its
various
communities would so live their
lives that the Jews could, in
the
very act
of being themselves, be just
like everybody else. There are
two
keys to
this failure: politics and culture.
In both dimensions the Jews
have acted
uniquely and not like any of
the other minorities."
[HERTZBERG,
p. 284]
In other words,
even in a revised American socio-cultural
system that been entirely reformed
to accommodate "patent Jewish
purpose," cultural pluralism
is still not enough for those
Jews who refuse to completely
assimilate, it is merely a means
to discretely reach strata even
more foreign to the founding
principles of America: Jews
implicitly demand a special
dimension of "uniqueness" --
their own caste -- outside the
realm of all others in the American
experiment, by which they can
connect to their Jewish brethren
throughout the world. Even Israel Zangwill, the Jewish writer
who is generally credited with
popularizing the term "The Melting
Pot"
(the long-dead concept
of America as a kind of homogenized
'soup' of immigrant cultures)
to describe American society
(via his successful 1908 play
of the same name), was eventually
a Zionist. "He gave more and
more of his energy to this cause
as time passed, and retreated
from his earlier position of
racial and religious mixture."
[GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p. 289-290]
(This is what Zangwill wrote
about the traditions of his
own people: "Beware of the goyim, his elders told Jacob ... They
are goyim,
foes of the faith, beings of
darkness ... drunkards and bullies,
swift with the fist or bludgeon,
many in species, but the worst
of the goyim are the creatures called Christians."
[GONEN, p. 133]
Nathan Glazer
still felt confident in publishing
the following in 1972 in his
classic volume, American
Judaism:
"There are different
branches of Judaism today, and
they take
somewhat different attitudes
to assimilation, but even the
most liberal
interpretation of Judaism
must fight the assimilation
of the Jews ...
Jews have been prominent
in the fight to forward the
assimilation of
ethnic groups ... [Yet]
there comes a time -- and it
is just about upon
us -- when American Jews
become aware of a contradiction
between
the kind of society America
wants it to become -- and indeed
the kind
of society most Jews
want it to be -- and the demands of the Jewish
religion. This religion
after all, prohibits inter-marriage,
asserts that
Jews are a people apart,
and insists that they consider
themselves in
exile until God restores
them to the land of Israel."
[GLAZER, p. 9]
(In a footnote Glazer
partially exempts the Reform
Judaism
movement who "don't consider
themselves in exile; they do
disapprove of intermarriage.")
Richard L. Rubenstein,
among many Jewish intellectuals,
increasingly echoes such entrenched
"particularist" themes (and,
hence, Zionism) in the 1990s,
arguing that: "The secular humanist
is most cognizant of abstract
universal values that are shared
with other human beings ...
[but] one must be a particular
kind of person to be a person
at all. The conception of humanity
in general is a meaningless
and tragic abstraction." [RUBENSTEIN,
R. p. 238]
"Cultural pluralism," says
Henry Feingold, "... became
part of a strategy to permit
more space for the expression
of Jewish particularity ...
some argue that, in its unwavering
support of Israel, American
Jewry had gone beyond its bounds.
If that is true, it is a measure
of America's extraordinary tolerance
of American Jewry's particularity."
[FEINGOLD, p. 149] "Legitimizing
the preservation of a minority
culture in the midst of a majority's
host society," says Howard Sachar,
"pluralism functioned as an
intellectual anchorage for an
educated Jewish second generation
... until the emergence of Zionism
in the post-World War II years
swept through American Jewry
with a climactic redemption
fervor of its own." [MCDONALD,
p. 299]
Strident activists
at all levels in shaping American
culture, Jewish organizations
have long fought for open and
diverse immigration to America,
mainly to divert the homogeneity
of Christian culture around
them. In an increasingly diverse
society, Jews are less easily
singled out for criticism or
attack. "Increasing ethnic heterogeneity,"
noted Jewish activist Earl Raab,
"as a result of immigration,
has made it even more difficult
for a political party or mass
movement of bigotry to develop."
[MCDONALD, p. 300] "Jewish influence
on immigration policy," observed
Kevin McDonald, "was facilitated
by Jewish wealth, education,
and social status. Reflecting
its general disproportionate
representation in markers of
economic success and political
influence ... [Jews] were able
to command a high level of financial,
political, and intellectual
resources in pursuing their
political aims." [MCDONALD,
JEWISH, p. 301]
In the 1920,
Horace Kallen's ideological
counterpoint, American sociologist
Edward Ross, criticized "the
endeavor of Jews to control
the immigration policy of the
United States," [MCDONALD, p.
319] especially in lobbying
for more and more Jewish immigrations
to America. "The systematic
campaign," complained Ross,
"in newspapers and magazines
to break down all arguments
for restriction and to calm
nativist fears is waged by one
and for one race. Hebrew money
is behind the National Liberal
Immigration League and its numerous
publications." [MCDONALD,
p. 312] (Even today,
300,000 Israeli citizens are
living in America; from a total
Jewish Israeli population of
about four million people, this
means that every thirteenth
Israeli lives in the United
States, extremely favorable
American immigration policy
towards that country).
Later,
as part of a concerted strategy,
notes Irving Kristol,
"Ever since
the Holocaust and the emergence
of the state of Israel,
American
Jews have been reaching towards
a more explicit and
meaningful
Jewish identity, and have been
moving away from the
universalist
secular humanism that was so
prominent a feature in their
prewar
thinking. But while American
Jews want to become more Jewish,
they do
not want American Christians
to become more Christian."
[in FEIN,
p. 245]
Jewish deconstructive
attack upon the Christian world
view may be noted more recently
in an incident in 1994 when
the preeminent Jewish American
"defense agency", the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai B'rith, turned
on the conservative Christian
community with venom, publishing
a report entitled The Religious
Right: the Assault on Tolerance
and Pluralism in America.
It proclaimed that the conservative
Christian movement was an "exclusionist"
movement seeking to "restore
what it perceived as the ruins
of a Christian nation by seeking
more closely to unite its version
of Christianity with state power."
[SILK, p. 296] The ADL attack
caught the Christian community
by surprise. Outraged, they
pointed out that their own struggle
for a voice in America was no
different than anyone else’s,
including Jews.
A major focus
of the ADL assault was upon
Pat Robertson, a leader of the
Christian Coalition and the
Christian Broadcasting Network,
a man who has for years even
hired a formal Jewish liaison
-- Ben Waldman
-- to act on his behalf
in the Jewish community. (The
head of Robertson's legal center,
the American Center for Law
and Justice, is Jay Sekulow,
a Christian who was born Jewish.
Another Christian, Lou Sheldon,
head of the Traditional Values
Coalition, was also born to
a Jewish mother). [LAPIN, D.,
1999, p. 275] Robertson was
particularly outraged by the
Jewish attack, and noted his
stellar record in supporting
Jewish and Israeli issues. The
Christian Broadcasting Network,
for example, had donated hundreds
of thousands of dollars to the
United Jewish Appeal and other
Jewish charities; Robertson
had also lobbied American politicians
against arms sales to Arab adversaries
of Israel. He even was involved
in supportive activities for
convicted Jewish American spy
(for Israel), Jonathan Pollard.
[SILK, p. 297] The Christian
Coalition responded with its
own report that documented the
inaccuracies and offenses in
the ADL's efforts to stifle
Christian expressions within
the context of religious pluralism,
A Campaign of Falsehoods:
The
Anti-Defamation League's
Defamation of Religious Conservatives.
A rare voice of reason in
the Jewish community, Rabbi
Daniel Lapin, noted publications
by both the ADL and the American
Jewish Committee (for example,
its The Political Activity of the Religious
Right: A Critical Analysis)
that defamed the Christian community,
writing:
"[The ADL] published
a book filled with unfair and
untrue defamation
of religious conservatives.
It contained such unrestrained
invective
as, 'The religious
Right brings to the debate over
moral and social
issues a rhetoric
of fear, suspicion and even
hatred.' As a rabbi and
a Jew, I was embarrassed
at the tone of both of these
books. Had any
Christian association
published anything comparable
about the Jewish
community, cries of
anti-Semitism would have rung
out far and wide --
and been justified
... [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 40]
... Even a quick glance
at publications and
direct-mail appeals from the
Anti-Defamation League,
American Jewish Committee,
American Jewish Congress and
others,
reveals a level of
rhetoric that far exceeds the
bounds of civilized
political discourse.
Their words demonstrate that
many Jewish
organizations do not
merely consider devout, politically
active
Christians to be misguided
-- they consider them evil.
I believe that
if the term anti-Semitism
is to retain any intellectual
and moral
integrity, we must
also today admit to the term
anti-Christianism. If
one is to be fought,
then surely both should be."
[LAPIN, D., 1999, p.
41]
(Meanwhile,
a Jewish ethnic magazine can
feature, merely as a curiosity,
a "Modern Orthodox" rabbi, Mayer
Schiller, for his championing
of "race separation." The magazine
explains that the rabbi, a teacher
in good standing at the Yeshiva
University High School for Boys,
doesn't teach "hatred for racial
minorities, but a rejection
of post-Enlightenment universalism
and secularism.") [EDEN, A.,
4-13-01]
Jewish anti-Christian
bashing is expressed in many
ways. In 1999, Rabbi Fred Guttman
wrote an angry editorial in
a Greensboro, North Carolina,
newspaper, complaining about
an earlier article in the paper
about a Christian business directory.
"The guide," the directory's
publisher had explained, "performs
a service for the Christian
consumer, enabling him to find
and do business with fellow
believers." [WILLIS, V., 1999,
11-15-99, p. B1] Incredibly,
not only did Rabbi Guttman decide
for everyone that the story
had no news value, he also had
the profound gall to compare
the nature of such a directory
(that sought merely to network
in business with other dedicated
Christians) to be parallel to
Nazi
intent! How so? "As a Jew
reading this article," he complained,
"I could not
help but recall the Nuremberg
laws of 1935 [the Nazi
race laws].
These laws mandated a boycott
of all non-Aryan businesses
in Germany ...
The guide implies that there
should be an economic
boycott of non-Christian
businesses. Thus, the parallel
to the Nuremberg
laws is certainly
fitting. Even more disturbing
was the forum that the
News and
Record chose to give such
free and positive publicity
to
such a nonnewsworthy
item. It saddened me that a
group that
encourages bias
and bigotry through de facto
economic boycotts
would receive
support from the News and
Record. At the very least,
the News
and Record should consider
taking an editorial stance against
this so-called
'Christian' yellow pages." [GUTTMAN,
F., 11-26-99, p.
A22]
Rabbi Gutman's outrageous
attack upon, and defamation
of, a local Christian interest
in networking with like-minded
people created a stir in the
Greensboro area. Gutman's hypocrisy
is breath-taking. Throughout
multi-cultural America there
are Iranian business directories,
Arab business directories, Armenian
business directories, Muslim
business directories, and many
others including, of course,
Jewish business directories.
(See, for example, the national
Jewish "yellow pages" by Sharon
and Michael Strassfeld. Or the
one called The Jewish Yellow Pages: A Directory of
Goods and Services by Mae
Rockland Tupa. Or note England's
Benjamin Cohen who became a
millionaire at age 17 for his
Jewishnet Internet site. He "started
Jewishnet
from his bedroom and aimed
to provide a business directory
for the community.") [DAILY
MAIL, 1-6-2000, p. 83] And the
intensity of Jewish collective
support for each other has few,
if any (as we will continue
to explore), equals in modern
America.
In another version
of the usual Jewish double standard
and anti-Christian attack, in
2000, Texas governor and presidential
candidate George W. Bush, was
publicly assailed by the American
Jewish Congress for declaring
June 10, 2000 as "Jesus Christ
Day" in Texas (formal state
recognition of the tenth anniversary
of a grassroots "March for Jesus"
day). The AJC complained that
the governor "affixed his signature
and the seal of the state of
Texas to a proclamation establishing
'Jesus Day' [which] demonstrates
the willingness to place the
imprimatur of government literally
on one faith." Bush's office
responded by noting that the
AJC never complained when the
U.S. Congress had earlier proclaimed
a day commemorating ultra-Orthodox
Hassidic rabbi Menachem Schneerson. Nor did the AJC complain about Bush's
formal Texas proclamations that
created an "Honor Israel Day,"
a "Holocaust Remembrance" day,
a day honoring Austin's Orthodox
Chabad House, a commemorative
day for the Baha'i religion, and a special day of honor for a community
of Sikhs. Even Bush's Republican
(partisan) colleague, Matt Brooks,
head of the Republican Jewish
Coalition, observed that "This
is again a sad example of the
American Jewish Congress and
other organizations showing
their anti-Christian bias. The
Jewish community has to stop
beating up on Christians for
belief in their faith." [FINGERHUT,
E., 7-13-2000]
Four months after
Bush's "Jesus Day" proclamation,
a New York Times reporter,
Laurie Goodsein, still was reporting
that
"What seemed
purely ceremonial has turned
into a controversy for
George Bush.
As word of Texas's Jesus Day
has spread through
the email, Jewish
newspapers and church-state
separatists, the
Republican presidential
nominee has come under criticism
for
insensitivity
to people of non-Christian faiths
and a disregard for
the First Amendment."
[GOODSTEIN, L., 8-6-2000, p.
14]
As scholar Kevin MacDonald writes
about the undercurrent at work
in such Jewish anti-Christian
activism:
"It
is not surprising that a powerful
strand of Jewish intellectual
activity
in the twentieth century
has been to pathologize highly
cohesive,
collective gentile social
structures, gentile nationalism,
gentile
authoritarian political
groups, and gentile ethnocentrism.
It is clearly in
the interests of Jews
to advocate the continuation
of the quintessential
Western cultural commitment
to individualism as the best
environment
for the continuation
of Jewish collectivism." [MACDONALD,
p. 264]
"Nothing is more foreign
to the spirit of Judaism," noted
influential pre-Zionist author
Moses Hess in the 19th century,
"than the idea of the egoistic
salvation of the isolated individual."
[WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 126]
The implications of
Jewish collectivism in capitalist
society were addressed by a
prominent Jewish socialist,
Bernard Lazare, in France, in
1894:
"Bourgeois society
is based entirely upon competition
between man and
in the field
of the daily necessities of
life. It affords us the spectacle
of
individuals
fighting bitterly one against
the other ... In this state
of society
Darwin's principle
of the struggle of life dominates
... If we conceive,
then, in the
midst of such a community, based
upon egoistic action,
associations
of citizens strongly organized
and gifted, animated for many
centuries by
the spirit of common action,
and knowing by instinct and
experience,
the advantages which they may
derive from union, it is
certain that
such organizations by directing
their activity towards the
same end as
that pursued by the scattered
individuals around them will
possess such
an advantage in the struggle
as to assure them an easy
victory. This
is just
the role which is being
played by the Jews of the
middle class
in modern society ... [LAZARE,
p. 168] ... The Jew ...
increases his
advantage by uniting with his
co-religionists possessed of
similar virtues,
and thus augments his powers
by acting in common with
his brethren;
the inevitable result being
that they out-distance their
rivals
in the pursuit
of any common end. In the midst
of a disunited middle
class, whose
members are engaged in a perpetual
struggle against one
another, the
Jews stand united as one. This
is the secret of their
success." [LAZARE,
p. 169]
In our own day,
the effect of an economically
empowered Jewish "extended family"
actually enforcing a disempowered
Gentile individualism has profound
political implications, grossly
advantageous to Jews. Following
the classical pattern of Jewish
and upper strata Gentile collusion
against the non-Jewish masses
(as evidenced throughout history
with everything from Court Jews in league with absolute monarchs
to Jewish communists as an integral
part of Russian totalitarian
elite), one recent study suggested
that, even today, high status
non-Jews tended to be individualist
in attitude, disinclined to
join groups, but were often
found in economic and political
association with Jews. [MACDONALD,
p. 264]
The
typical institutionalized Jewish
device these days to "pathologize"
Gentile group affiliations is
to stigmatize them as being
anti-Semitic in nature: morally,
and --
more importantly -- legally,
impermissible in the American
universalistic fabric. (Hence,
a rabbi can gain public forum
and be taken seriously in declaring
that local Christian efforts
to economically collectivize
is a manifestation of Nazi fascism,
while, at the same time, a cornerstone
of Jewish identity to this day
is
that very same thing). The
Jewish polity (led by its collectivized
"defense agency" heads -- the
Anti-Defamation League, American
Jewish Committee, American Jewish
Congress, over 100 Jewish "community
relations councils," et al)
functions as a massive, unified
"attack dog" to destroy any
semblance in others of a solidarity
similar to their own, or, rather,
any that could pose a power
threat to Jewish collectivism.
Some Jews believe, says
Benedict Viviano, "that Jews
... are safest when Christians
are weak ... Thus [such Jews]
... foster publications which
blame the Church for all the
suffering of the Jews throughout
history in an undifferentiated
fashion." [VIVIANO, p. 354]
In historical overview, as Jewish
author Walter Jacob notes,
"The Jewish
scholars of the mid-nineteenth
century realized that the
Church could
now be attacked without fear
of retaliation. Its power
had faded, and
its influence was constantly
diminishing. The decline
of Christianity
was a hopeful sign. Jewish scholars
saw it as beneficial
for Judaism
and mankind, for they believed
that Judaism or a new
religion akin
to it would eventually become
dominant. Although this
optimism is
gone, the weakening of Christianity
is still welcomed by
many contemporary
Jews." [JACOB, W., 1974, p.
230]
Jewish-born
Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis
has come to play a profoundly
influential role in modern
America. Jewish scholars Stanley
Rothman and S. Robert Lichter
note Freud's views of Christianity,
at root in this psychological
movement:
"Though
it is sometimes forgotten
today, Freud's work was profoundly
subversive
to the cultural underpinnings
of European Christian society,
a
subversiveness of which he
was not unaware. There is
evidence that some
of
the impetus for the creation
of psychoanalysis lay in his
hostility to
Christianity."
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p.
125]
These
two scholars also note the
nature of the widespread modern
Jewish leftist/liberal/radical
assault upon the Christian
world:
"In
sum, the aim of the Jewish
radical is to estrange the
Christian
from
society, as he feels estranged
from it. The fact that the
United
States
is no longer 'Christian' in
any real sense, or that Jews
have
moved
to positions of considerable
power and influence, is of
little
import. Its Christian base
is still unconsciously identified
as
the decisive oppressive element
... Thus many radical Jews,
even
when they do not identify
with Judaism, unconsciously
retain
a generalized hostility to
Christian culture. Again,
Portnoy
[the
leader character in Philip
Roth's Portnoy's Complaint]
is a
good
example. Only on the analyst's
couch is he willing to admit
the
hostility he feels." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER,
1982, p. 125]
Russian-Israeli
author Israel Shamir notes
that Jewish hatred for Christians
and Christianity is a consistent
theme to this very day:
"Rami
Rozen expressed the Jewish
tradition in a long feature
in a major Israeli
Israeli
newspaper Haaretz:
'Jews feel toward Jesus today
what they felt in 4c or
in
the Middle Ages ... it is
not fear, it is hatred and
despise [sic]. For centuries
Jews
concealed from Christians
their hate to Jesus, and this
tradition continues
even
now. 'He is revolting and
repulsive," said an important
modern religious
Jewish
thinker. Rozen writes that
this 'repulsion passed from
observant Jews
to
the general Israeli public."
[SHAMIR, I., 2001]
Secular
Jewish journalist Stephen
Bloom was surprised when an
ultra-Orthodox Jew reprimanded
him for saying hello to a
non-Jewish stranger:
"'The
goyim,' Lazar told
me, as we crossed the street
again, three blocks from the
shul,
'will always be goyim,
no matter how nice they are
to you. So what's the
point?'
Lazar's comments underscored
the Hasidim's contempt for
non-Jews,
which
wasn't limited to the Postville
[Iowa] gentiles, but to all
Christians ... But
if
truth be told, Lazar's anti-gentile
sentiment wasn't limited to
just Hasidic Jews.
The
Hasidim put into practice
what many Jews just talked
about. Lazar's
gentile-bashing
reminded me of the Yiddish
aphorism Er shmekt nit
un er
shtinkt
nit ('He doesn't smell
and he doesn't stink'), used
derisively to describe
non-Jews,
who are viewed as inconsequential
and unimportant. The maxim
wasn't
very different from the expression
my own parents used about
the
simpleton
who's got a goyisher
kop [non-Jewish head]."
[BLOOM,
S., 2001, p. 196]
Jewish
author Paul Cowan notes what
happened when a group of Jews
and their Christian spouses
all got together in a room
to air out their differences:
"In
one of our largest, most polarized
groups almost all the gentiles
perceived
the
Jews' responses [to Christianity]
as another sign of their clannishness.
'You
seem to me like a wall of
people,' said a New York-born
Catholic who
was
married to a Jew from Philadelphia.
'When I'm around Jews, I feel
like
a
persecuted minority.' 'I was
just amazed at all the hostility,'
said a woman
from
rural Pennsylvania who raised
as a Mennonite but now describes
herself
as
an agnostic. 'None of the
Jews here seem able to tolerate
religious differences.'
Her
husband, who was born into
a very prosperous, very assimilated
Jewish
family,
agreed, 'I'm not used to Jews
victimizing other people.'
It
wasn't victimization. The
exercise had unleashed a powerful
tribal memory.
But
the words Jews used to describe
the cross enraged most Christians.
'I've
been
married to you for three years
and I didn't realize you had
such
disrespectful
feelings about my religion,'
a Methodist woman said to
her
Jewish
husband." [COWAN, P., 1987,
p. 184]
How deep is modern American Jewry's animosity
to others? In one 1988 study,
a third of Jewish respondents
went so far as to regard "the
religious and racial identities"
of even Catholic and Black
liberal
Democrats "as grounds
for suspicion."
Charles Liebman and
Stephen Cohen attribute this
paranoia to Jewish beliefs
"from their mythic past. Strong
nationalist, ethnic, or religious
loyalties of Gentiles increase
the likelihood of their being
anti-Semitic. The safest goy is one devoid of strong group commitments."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 48-48]
Jewish suspicion, distrust,
and disdain for non-Jews is
so great that even converts
to Judaism -- those who are incapable of claiming
an expressly hereditary
lineage to the Jewish
Chosen People mythology --
are subject to widespread
Jewish rejection and discrimination.
"The strong familistic thrust
among Jews," remark Liebman
and Cohen, "has meant that
converts have been treated
with some degree of suspicion.
At the very least, it has
meant that Jews do not relate
to converts in the same way
they relate to those born
Jewish." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p.
23]
Even overtly anti-Semitic
non-Jewish organizations like
the Ku Klux Klan (successfully
marginalized from mainstream
white society) and the Nation
of Islam (unsuccessfully marginalized
from mainstream Black society)
are -- however condemned and
attacked by Jewish strategists
-- essentially other peoples'
echoes of the genetically-based
Chosen People ethos, a Jewish
gift to mankind.
Why is the idea of American
Jewry banding tightly together
expressly for their own interests
and advancement any less repulsive
than "white people" (or anybody
else) doing the same, especially
when Jews, by all measures of
economic and political influence,
are as a "special interest"
group incomparably far more
powerful?
The fact that American
Jewry can get away with it in
the illusory world of "public
relations" is due to grand design.
The important difference between
Jews and others is that the
Jewish polity is -- as it has
been throughout the centuries
-- dissimulative in its hostility
and suspicion of the non-Jewish
Other; the Ku Klux Klan and
the Nation of Islam are overt
in their animosity to, and "separateness"
from, those who are not their
racial and ideological kindred.
(Note, for example, the
results of a case of a Ku Klux
Klan lawsuit in 2000 against
the University of Missouri at
St. Louis. The Klan sought to
purchase a 15-second promotion
after National Public Radio's
"All Things Considered" program
at the college radio station.
The university refused the Klan
air time, claiming that subsequent
bad publicity would damage the
university economically, and
an Appeals court upheld the
college's decision. As disreputable
as the KKK's overt racism is
to most Americans, the Klan's
lawyer, Robert Herman (who is
Jewish), had a valid point about
free speech double
standards when he noted
that "if the radio decides its
listeners don't care for Jews,
can they keep Jews off the air
too?") [MCMURRAY, J., 2-17,
2000]
In a discussion
about left wing Jewish efforts
"to change society," Jewish
scholars Stanley Rothman and
S. Robert Lichter note that
"The basic thrust
is to undermine all aspects
of culture
which contributed
to his or her
own marginality. Thus Jews in
the United States and Europe
have been in
the forefront of not only political
radicalism, but also
various forms
of cultural subversion ... Often
such subversion involves
an attack upon
genuine inequities or irrationalities.
However, the attack is
generally not
directed at the particular inequity
or irrationality per se.
Rather, such
inequities or irrationalities
are used as a means for achieving
a larger purpose:
the general weakening of the
social order itself."
[ROTHMAN, p. 130, in Prager, p. 70]
Elsewhere,
they note:
"In
almost every country about which
we have information, a segment
of the
Jewish community
played a very vital role in
movements designed to
undermine
the existing order. This was
true even in the United States
where
Jews have achieved unparalleled
economic, cultural, and
social
success." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER,
1982, p. 110]
"Modern
political history," notes Jewish
author Philip Mendes, "indicates
a clear connection between being
Jewish and being radical." [MENDES,
P., 1993, p. 9]
Maurice Samuel, a
Zionist and popular Jewish American
chauvinist in his time, put
Jewish radicalism this way,
in his confrontational book
of 1924, You Gentiles:
"We Jews are the destroyers,
will remain the destroyers forever,
NOTHING that
you will do will meet our needs
and demands. We will
forever destroy
because we need a world of our
own, a God-world,
which is not
your [Gentile] nature to build
... Those of us who fail to
understand that
truth will always be found in
alliance with your rebellious
factions until
disillusionment comes, the wretched
fate which scattered us
through your
midst has thrust this unwelcome
role upon us."
[BRENNER , ZIONISM,
p. 23]
Samuel, a naturalized
American citizen and secretary
of the Zionist Organization
of America, was no marginalized
crank. Louis Kaplan notes that
he "played a major role in re-Judaizing
American Jewry from the 1920s
until his death in 1972
... Samuel reminded the
Jewish-born universalist of
his day (and ours) that love
of humanity is too nebulous
and superficial, even mawkish.
Concern for all human beings
begins with caring for the specific.
Let the individual Jew
hold dear the Jewish people." Samuel, adds Emmanuel Goldsmith, "played
a major role in the emergence
of the American Jew's sense
of Jewish identity and in
the American Jews' definition
of Jewishness." And Milton Hindus
called Samuel "the most popular
platform personality of American
Jewry." [KAPLAN, p. 453-465]
"A powerful
force driving Jews toward radicalism
is their sense of alienation
from American society," says
Nathaniel Weyl, "... They often
espouse values at variance with
those of the majority and coalesce
in a congregation or political
party with the characteristics
of a despised elite." [RUBENSTEIN,
p. 148-149]
Sam Lehman-Wilzig, like
many Jews, in the Zionist journal
Midstream romanticizes
the Jewish deconstruction of
the non-Jewish world, asserting
that Jews are the essential
seed of human progress and enlightenment:
"Whether outside
the campus or inside the laboratory,
the Jews continue
to heroically
challenge the political and
intellectual conventional wisdoms
of the
age ... By constantly constituting
an 'oppositionist' force on
the
world
scene ... the Jew continually
constitutes a mighty thorn in
the side
of world
society." [LEHMAN-WILZIG, p.
24]
Jewish
left-wing radical Saul Alinsky
even introduced his 1971 book,
Rules for Radicals, with
this dubious inspiration:
"Lest
we forget at least an over-the-shoulder
acknowledgement to the very
first
radical:
from all our legends, mythology,
and history (and who is to know
where
mythology
leaves off and history begins
-- or which is which), the first
radical
known
to man who rebelled against
the establishment and did it
so effectively that
he
at least won his own kingdom
-- Lucifer." [ALINSKY, S., 1971,
pre-
table
of contents page]
In the religious
sphere, Jewish attacks upon
Christian collectivism in America,
effecting strategies to insure
Christian religious marginalization, have gone on for decades now. "In its newly adopted role as a beleaguered
minority," notes an unsympathetic
David Hollinger, "... the complaint
of Christians as the 'newest
minority' insists that Christians
are discriminated against, and
that their opinions are not
taken seriously. Everyone but
traditional Christians, it seems,
gets the chance to speak out."
[HOLLINGER, p. 33] Jewish legal
lobbyists realize that there
is no particular "Christian"
polity without religion as its
base (and even this is divided
along various sectarian lines).
While there is certainly residual
"Christian" influence in the
values and mores of a secularized Christian people,
there is no collective, secular,
nationalist Christian political
entity equivalent to that of
the Jews'. The Christian polity
dissolves, or is atomized, when
secularized; Jewish solidarity
endures secularly, transformed
along the mythological base
of its hereditary line, its historical
transnational Jewish
patriotism, and its "we-them"
principles, whether religious
or not. Indeed, Judaism has
always been preserved as both
a religion and a nationalist entity -- a
"nation-religion." Or, as Jewish
scholar Nicholas de Lange, observes,
"To be a Jew means first and
foremost to belong to a group,
the Jewish people, and the religious
beliefs are secondary, in a
sense, to this corporate allegiance."
[DE LANGE, N., p. 4] In modern
times most Jews have discarded
the Judaic religion but renewed
the nationalist foundation of their
collective self-identity. As
such, the American constitutional
principle that "separates between
Church and state" plays into
non-religious Jewish hands;
hence, most American Jews understand
themselves not fitting into
a religious context, but rather
as an elite (and usually racial),
secular caste in the American
system.
Alice Bloch is an
activist feminist and lesbian,
two identities that are emphatically
rejected by traditional Judaism.
Yet Bloch remains ardently "Jewish,"
noting her identity -- that
so much mystifies non-Jewish
acquaintances -- this way:
"Jewish identity is
important to me because being
Jewish
is an integral part
of myself: it's my inheritance,
my roots. Christian
women sometimes have
a hard time understanding this,
because
Christian identity
is so much tied up with religious
beliefs. It is
possible to be an
ex-Catholic or an ex-Baptist,
but it is not possible
to be an ex-Jew."
[BLOCH, p. 117]
About 20 gay synagogues
have even been created throughout
America in the last three decades,
places where homosexual men
and women assert a Jewish religious
identity, despite the fact that
mainstream Judaism rejects them.
[WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 76]
Sylvia Boorstein, a former
psychologist who teaches meditation
and Buddhism in northern California's
affluent Marin county, has even
written a book about how she
manages being an "observant
Jew" and a Buddhist at the same
time, somehow grafting the Buddha
onto her root identity. "I am
a Jew," she writes, "because
my parents were mild-mannered,
cheerful best friends who loved
me enormously, and they were
Jews. I am a prayerful, devout
Jew because I am a Buddhist."
While visiting Jerusalem, she
notes troubles she had with
some Israelis, but then reaches
back into the Holocaust epic,
thinking, 'I'm in the middle
of a locker room with naked
Jewish women, and we're all
safe here.' And I was so happy
that these women about who I'd
been harboring all these terrible
thoughts were alive, I was overwhelmed
with love for them. I thought,
'This is wonderful. They can
swim however they want. Now
I have my values straight.'"
[BERSON, M., 4-5-97; TULLER,
D., 3-9-97]
"Jewish Buddhists,"
seemingly a contradiction in
terms, are fond of calling themselves JUBUs. [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p.
6] Roger Kamenetz notes the
case of friend Marc Lieberman:
"He married a fellow
Buddhist practitioner, Nancy
Garfield, in a
Vietnamese Buddhist
temple in San Francisco. Not
just a phase
anymore. Still,
when I visited them in San Francisco,
I noted that
he made kiddush
on Friday night and sent his
son from his first
marriage to
a Hebrew school. Even as a Buddhist
he seemed a
better Jew than
I was." [KAMENETZ, R., 1994,
p. 10]
Psychologist Wendy
Orange also flirted with Buddhism,
but in later years returned
full-force to her Jewish identity,
even moving to Israel. The beginning
of her return to her tribal
identity, as she recounts, began
with a dream:
"It's the Jewish High
Holidays, but I'm at a Buddhist
retreat. Meditations
are over; I drift
towards a run-down section of
town where I enter a
dissolute tavern.
That's when I hear Hebrew melodies.
They grow louder,
obliterating the Buddhist
chants and gongs. When the sad
cantorial
fades away, I sidle
up to a degenerate guy and am,
at the dream's end,
madly trying to kiss
him, even though he's more or
less drowning in his
beer." [ORANGE, W.,
2000, p. 14]
Ms. Orange wondered
what this dream meant. Her Jewish
therapist had an answer:
"Oh, that's an easy
one. This dream points to your
neglected Judaism.
It's telling you to
search for your ethnic roots
.... Your dream shows
that you're 'drunk'
on the wrong religious practices.
Study the great
Jewish scholars now.
One day, with luck, you'll go
to Israel."
[ORANGE, W., 2000,
p. 15]
Alan
Lew has written his own book
on the Jewish Buddhist
theme, with the twist that
he followed the universalistic
path of Zen to ultimately
return to his tribal home
as a rabbi:
"[There
was] a guru named Rudrananda,
or, as he was known, Rudi.
Rudi's
real
name was Albert Rudolph. He
was a Jewish guy who grew
up in Brooklyn
...
[LEW, A., 1999, p. 51] ...
One day Norman [also Jewish]
invited me to
come
with him to the San Francisco
Zen Center to hear a famous
Japanese
Zen
master talk. At least half
the people at the Zen Center
were Jewish, but the
Japanese
Zen master, thinking that
since he was in America everyone
was Christian,
based
his lecture on a text from
the Gospel ... [LEW, A., 1999,
p. 60] ... [At the
Berkeley
Zen center] Mel Weitsman,
the Zen priest, would already
be seated ...
There
were usually only about four
to six people present at any
session. Sometimes
we
would joke about how there
weren't enough for a minyan,
realizing most
of
us were Jews -- Mel, his wife,
Liz Horowitz, Norman, another
man named Ron
Nester,
and me ... [LEW, A. 1999,
p. 63] ... The Zen Center
I belonged to was
a
strong, positive community,
and the connections beteween
the people were
deep
and real, but it wasn't a
blood connection. There was
not the essential
and
permanent bond that comes
with family. I felt this most
strongly when I
took
[son] Steve with me to holiday
gatherings at the zendo [Zen
center]. Looking
through
the window at this Jewish
family across the way, I experienced
a profound
and
surprising sense of longing
... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 99]
[At a Los Padres
mountains
Zen monastery] there was a
ceremony for the installation
of
Steve
Weintraub, the new head monk,
or shuso ... Like me,
Steve Weintraub
had
grown up on Brooklyn ... Steve
Weintraub was of course Jewish.
Whenever
I
came into the room, I checked
to see who there looked Jewish.
I wondered
if
anyone knew that I was Jewish,
and if they cared. I had been
doing
this
unconsciously ever since we
molved to Pleasantville, but
I had just
|recently
become conscious of it. The
more I meditated, the more
aware I
became
of the contents of my unconscious
mind." [LEW, A., 1999, p.
111]
Lew
eventually had an "Orthodox
Jewish wedding." [LEW, A.,
1999, p. 142] His next wife,
Sherril Jaffe, a writer, was
also Jewish. [LEW, A., 1999,
p. 145] Lew ended up at the
Jewish Theological Seminary
in Manhattan where "JTS required
rabbinical students to spend
one year in Israel." [LEW,
A., 1999, p. 202] In Israel,
he notes, "there was a deep
joy to being in Israel and
studying Torah in Jerusalem.
I had the familiar sense of
coming home." [LEW, A., 1999,
p. 207] At the Wailing Wall
in Jerusalem, Lew is at first
intimidated by a black-dressed
Chasid leading prayers, but
suddenly recognizes him:
"Suddenly
the scales fell from my eyes
and I realized that I knew
him from Sproul
Plaza
in Berkeley [University of
California]! The long ponytail
that he used to wear
then
had migrated around the side
of his head and had become
sidelocks. He
was
a middle-class Jewish kid
from New Jersey. Sixteen years
ago he had
been
pretending to be a native
American; now he was pretending
to be a
Chasid."
[LEW, A., 1999, p. 212]
Lew
eventually ended up in the
San Francisco area again as
a rabbi. "Jews," he says,
"who
had been practicing Buddhists
started lining up outside
my office to speak
to
me. Some of them had been
practicing Buddhists for twenty
or thirty years,
and
they were quite happy with
it; nevertheless, they felt
haunted by their
Jewishness,
and they had never been able
to shake it. They begged me
to suggest
something
for them to do about it. I
didn't know what to tell them.
Norman and I
decided
to hold a colloqium, a panel
discussion on Judaism and
Buddhism. He
and
I and several teachers of
Jewish meditation would be
on the panel. We
expected
around fifty people, but hundreds
of people showed up. What
did
they all want? ... My goal
was to help Jews deepen their
Jewish practice
with
Buddhist-style meditation
techniques, and Norman's interest
was in
reaching
out to Jewish Buddhists who
wanted to have some way to
express
their
Jewishness." [LEW, A., 1999,
p. 286]
"It
was in a Buddhist monastery,
meditating, " concludes Lew
near the end of his volume,
"that I realized who I really
am. I am a Jew. A Jew can
use the practice of meditation
to illuminate his or her Jewish
soul. And meditation can help
us slow down enough so that
we can once again experience
the beauty of the Jewish path."
[LEW, A., 1999, p. 306]
Joachim
Prinz noted, in 1973 (in his
volume about the community
of Jews who faked their lives
as Christians for centuries
in Spain), the "Jewish" Muslims
(the jadidim) of the
Meshed area of Iran:
"They
fast during the holy weeks
of Ramadan and also on Yom
Kppur, the Jewish
Day
of Atonement. They celebrate
all the Jewish as well as
the Mohammedan holidays,
but
economic necessity forces
them to keep their shops open
on the Jewish Sabbath
...
After a hundred years after
their incomplete conversion
the jadidim retain
a
dual
allegiance to the law of the
Koran and that of the Torah
which poses neither
a
religious nor a psychological
problem for them." [PRINZ,
UJ., 1973, p. 7]
Elsewhere
Prinz notes the case of Franz
von Mendelssohn, of German
Jewish descent, whose family
was -- for generations --
Christian:
"When
Hitler came to powr the head
of the banking house, Franz
von Mendelssohn ...
was
president of the Lutheran
Churches in Germany ... [He]
announced that he
had
resigned from his office in
the Church, although, even
according to the anti-
Jewish
Nuremberg Laws, he was considered
an Aryan. 'I feel,' he said
with great
emotion,
'that a descendant of the
Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn
could
no
longer pretend' ... '[It is]
too late,' he said, 'Too late
for me [to return to Judaism].
I
and my ancestors have been
brought up as believing Christians
for four
generations.
I can only return to my people,
not to its faith. I identify
with their
pain,
their fate, their pride.'
He did not return to Judaism,
but his daughter,
Eleanora
von Mendelssoh, a well-known
actress, became an Orthodox
Jew."
[PRINZ,
J., 1973, p. 12-13]
Famed
Holocaust guru Elie Wisel
describes French Catholic
Cardinal (and possibly the
next pope) Jean Marie-Lustiger's
enduring Jewish identity:
"He
insists that having been born
a Jew, he will die a Jew ...
[WIESEL, E., 1999,
p.
170] ... 'I feel Jewish,'
the archbishop responds. 'I
refuse to renounce my
roots,
my Jewishness' .... He goes
on to make the point that
his Jewishness
annoys
anti-Semites and that this
does not displease him. Why
should he make
them
happy by turning his back
on the people they execrate?'
[WIESEL, E., 1999,
p.
171] ... [He] is determined
to remain a son of the Jewish
people ... He
acts
accordingly; anyone who requests
his assistance in defending
a Jewish
cause
can count on his support ...
During the scandalous affair
of the Carmelite
convent a Auschwitz
[the 'scandal' was that nuns
wanted to keep a cross at
their
convent
next to the former concentration
camp, against international
Jewish demands
to
take it down] , for example,
his interventions [on behalf
of Jews] must have raised
a
few eyebrows in Rome. As must
his sympathy for the State
of Israel, of which he
is
the most devoted defender
inside the Catholic Church."
[WIESEL, E., 1999, p.
171-172]
Simon
Wisenthal notes the case of
prominent Austrian poltician
Otto Bauer:
"Jews
were the founders of the Social
Democatic Party in Austria.
Always
the leadership was Jewish
-- from Viktor Adler to Otto
Bauer. Yes, Adler
became a Protestant but Bauer
once said: 'I am a Jew, but
for me is the Judaism
not a nation, not a religion,
but a shared fate.' And you
cannot leave it because
then you are a deserter. This
why he remained a Jew.'" [LEVY,
A., 1993, p. 345]
Secular
Jew Stephen Bloom puts Jewish
identity like this:
"I
was a Jew through and through,
from my curly brown hair and
robust nose
to the synapses in
my brain and the corpuscles
of my blood. A day, an hour,
didn't
go
by without my reflecting in
some way on my culture and
my religion. Religious
culture
and devotion to faith are
two different things, and
while I wasn't willing to
to
become more attached to the
organizational rigors of my
faith, I wasn't about
to
let go of what I carried inside
me every day." [BLOOM S.,
2001, p. 21]
Anne
Roiphe notes, even in the
secular world, the pseudo-religious
dimension (the faith)
of modern Jewish identity
to its tribal foundation,
Zionism, and its Israel-centeredness:
"Zionism, religious
or political, is still mystical
in nature. It requires a
passionate emotional
commitment to the redemption
[of Jews] -- it
is not a position
for rationalists, for universalists.
It requires unthinking
commitment to one
side of the story. It grants
the rewards of [Jewish]
togetherness." [ROIPHE,
1981, p. 31-32]
When professor Blu
Greenberg was asked what it
meant to her to be a Jew, she
replied:
"How can I answer
that question? Everything in
my life has always been
connected to my Jewishness.
For me, being Jewish is the
same thing
as being alive. They're
inseparable." [ROIPHE, 1981,
p. 25]
As Jean-Francois Steiner
has noted about his Jewish identity:
"The Jew, more than any other
man, realizes himself within
his national community; as a
Jew he can exist only insofar
as he belongs to it." [STEINER,
J., 1967, p. 149]
Meanwhile,
the continuing institutionalized
efforts of the nationalist Jewish
polity to impugn, weaken, and
reconstruct non-Jewish organizations
to Jewish qualifications is
expressed even in continuous
attacks upon the Catholic Church.
It is another age-old Jewish
moral double standard: one application
for themselves, and another
for others. While unified Jewish
lobbying organizations can successfully
pressure (using arguments of
universalism and ethnic and
religious tolerance) even the
Vatican to formally excise traditional
references to "Jews who killed
Christ" in their seminal New
Testament literature, (proclaimed
by Pope Paul VI in 1965 in a
document known as Nostra
Aetate), the entire foundation
of Jewish Talmudic racism, exclusionism,
anti-Christian and anti-Gentile
malice and chauvinism can go
not only unchallenged, but completely
unmentioned. Always. And not only does it
go unmentioned, but to dare
to raise such pertinent subjects
is condemned as Gentile bigotry!
Israel Shahak notes the supreme
Jewish audacity and hypocrisy
in still using the Holocaust
to guilt-trip Christians into
changing aspects of their very
religious doctrine (per perceptions
of Jews) without getting good
faith Jewish "religious adjustments"
(or even secular ones) in return.
Take one of
the most aggressive Jewish demands
in Christian terrain. Riding
Gentile sympathy for Jewish
suffering in the Holocaust,
Jews have successfully demanded
a change in official Catholic
(and other Christian) belief;
the Church has accordingly excised
from its formal teachings the
notion that Jews were responsible
for the crucifixion of Christ.
Yet, Jewish religious literature
itself actually
takes full credit for killing
Christ. "According to the
Talmud," notes Israel Shahak,
"Jesus was executed by a proper
rabbinical court for idolatry,
inciting other Jews to idolatry,
and contempt of rabbinical authority.
All classical Jewish sources
which mention his execution
are quite happy to take responsibility
for it. In the Talmudic account
the Romans are not even mentioned."
[SHAHAK, p. ] According to the
millennia-old Jewish book about
Jesus -- Tol'doth Yeshu,
Jewish professor Joseph Klausner
notes that "the sages of Israel
recognized [Jesus] and arrested
him. They took and hanged him
on the eve of Passover." [KLAUSNER,
p. 54]
"Jesus," notes the 1997
Oxford Dictionary of the
Jewish Religion, "was arrested
as a potential revolutionary
and executed (by crucifixion)
by order of the Roman procurator
Pontius Pilate, probably at
the instigation of Jewish circles
who feared the Roman reaction
to messianic agitation." [WERBLOWSKY,
Z., p. 368]
Another
Israeli, Israel Shamir, notes
the usual dissimulation of modern
Jewry, this time regarding the
killing of Christ:
"Joseph
Dan, a professor of Jewish mysticism
in Heberew University in
Jerusalem,
writing on the death of Jesus
stated, 'The modern Jewish apologists,
hesitantly
adopted by the church, preferred
to put the blame on Romans.
But
the medieval Jew did not wish
to pass the buck. He tried to
prove that
Jesus
had to be killed, and he was
proud of killing Him. The Jews
hated and
despised
Christ and Christians.' Actually,
adds professor Dan, there is
little
place
to doubt that the Jewish enemies
of Jesus cause his execution."
[SHAMIR,
I., 2001]
Typically, Jewish
professor Ellis Rivkin proposes
that Jews could not be responsible
for the death of Christ, because
it was, rather, the "system's"
fault. "If," he says, "we are to assess responsibility,
we once again find ourselves
laying it at the feet of the
Roman imperial system ... It
was not
the Jewish people who crucified
Jesus, and it was not the Roman people -- it was the imperial
system, a system that victimized
the Jews, victimized the Romans,
and victimized the spirit of
God." [author's emphases: RIVKIN,
p. 256] By this all-encompassing
victimhood logic then, it is
abstract ideas (and not people)
that bear ultimate responsibility
for human crimes, and we may
thereby absolve all
victims of German fascism,
defined in this manner to include
even the Nazi perpetrators themselves,
who must be understood as mere
pawns, caught in the web of
social forces greater than them.
In any case, releasing modern
Jews from the group responsibility
for the historic accusation
that they killed Christ has
no forgiveness counterpart in
the Jewish community where anti-Christian
animosity -- and even hatred
-- runs deep, so much so that
Christians are branded as being
generically anti-Semitic. Christianity
itself is even repeatedly declared
by many as a foundation of German
Nazism. And a collective
guilt is often demanded
upon all
of Christian heritage.
"The Catholic
Church has certainly gone a
long way in transforming its
theology of Judaism," liberal
rabbi Byron Sherwin noted in
1992, "particularly in comparison
to the way things were before
the Second Vatican Council.
Theological changes have led
to changes in relations with
Judaism. The Jewish community,
I think, has so far not responded."
[SHERWIN, p. 154-155] "Since
the late 1960's," says J.J.
Goldberg, "the [formal] dialogue
[between Christian and Jewish
organizations] brought extensive
changes in Church teachings
about Judaism. Oddly, there
has been no reciprocation: to
the frustration of Catholic
participants, Jewish participants
have never agreed to an examination
of Jewish teaching, because
of an Orthodox ban on interreligious
'disputation.'" [GOLDBERG, p.
62]
This is an old
and enduring Jewish theme. In
fact, such one-sided manipulation
is an unshakably endemic part
of "being Jewish," as we can
see in Karl Marx's critique
about the subject 150 years
ago:
"When
the Jew demands emancipation
from the Christian state, he
asks
that the Christian state gives
up its religious prejudices.
Does
he,
the Jew, give up his religious
prejudice? What right, therefore,
has
he to demand of others the abdication
of their religion?"
[CRUSE,
p. 169]
Jewish myopia on the
subject of Christian-Jewish
relations is always a given.
This is how rabbi Byron Sherwin,
vice-president of the Spertus
College of Judaism in Chicago
and advocate of a "dialogue"
with Catholicism in Poland completely
neglects the self-enforced nationalist,
separatist core of Jewish history
and identity (noted throughout
scholarship everywhere as the
Jewish "nation apart" self-conception),
charging that common Polish
perceptions of this Jewish fact
is a foundation for irrational
anti-Semitism:
"When I came
here [to Poland] for the first
time, I was shocked
by the terminology
'Polish nation' and 'Jewish
nation.' This
terminology
assumes that, even though they
lived in Poland,
the Jews were
not part of the Polish nation
or people. If you
start with the
assumption that someone is an
outsider, that
very assumption
is the basis for prejudice."
[SHERWIN, p. 162]
Sherwin's view, of
course, represents the best
(most Jews do not even feign
a working relationship with
the organized Catholic community)
the Jewish community has in
"dialogue" with Catholicism.
Sherwin's view is the usual
historical revisionism (via
the modern myths of multicultural
tolerance) to completely gloss
over endemic -- past and enduring
-- Jewish ethnocentrism. Jews have always understood themselves everywhere
in their diaspora as "outsiders."
In 1976 a Catholic
priest, Father Andrew Greeley,
wrote with agitation about the
ages-old Jewish double moral
standard:
"A Jewish
leader chided me because Catholics
were not vigorous
enough
in their support of Israel.
It was not, he told me, high
enough on
our agenda.
I asked him how high Ulster
was on his. He told me that
was different.
How different?"
After addressing
continuous anti-Catholic prejudice
in America, Father Greeley then
added, "The point is that such
attitudes are so unquestionably
held by the New York liberal
intellectual establishment (and
particularly by its Jewish component)
that they have become undiscussable
assumptions." [GREELEY, p. 75]
The continuous exhortations
by Jews to crucify Christianity
itself (and particularly the
Catholic Church) as innately
malevolent is institutionalized
in the Jewish community. The
Christian faith is relentlessly
forced into a defensive posture
against an omnipresent Jewish
ideological aggression that
ceaselessly makes demands from
its self-celebrated position
of higher moral certitude (per
its "unique" Holocaust perch).
The Catholic Church is especially
badgered and harassed as worldwide
Jewry demands a humbling "apology"
for not doing more to help the
Jews in World War II; some Jews
go so far as to insinuate that
Catholic church members were
somehow active murderers. The
Jewish onslaught of Catholicism
is so incessant, and accepted
by the western mass media so
unquestioningly, that in 1997
the New York Times ran
a headline proclaiming:
"Apology
and the Holocaust. The Pope's
In a Confessional and the
Jews
are Listening." [BOHLEN, p.
10]
Let us reflect
upon the conceptual implications
here. The traditional form of
a confession is this: the confessor
(the Pope) gets on his knees
to the listener/pardoner (the
Jews) who mediates between confessor
and God. In January 1998 the
Jewish Week interviewed
new Anti-Defamation League chairman
Howard Berkowitz who -- with
nine other audacious associates
-- were soon to visit the Pope
in the Vatican. What for? Interfaith
"dialogue?" Berkowitz said that
"We want to
talk to him about opening the
Vatican archives as they relate
to
World War II ... We want to
see baptismal records and other
documents
regarding the church's activities
during the Holocaust. We
have developed
a good relationship with members
of his senior staff and
we want
to explore these things." [AIN,
S., ADL, p. 9]
Here then
we have the ADL and the World
Jewish Congress, poised as self-appointed
police powers, chutzpah-supreme,
arrogantly demanding another
religious organization's private
records, as part of the Grand
Jewish Inquisition. If the Jewish
Interrogators have only Goodness
at heart, let us suggest that,
in good faith, they first open
their own closets for public
scrutiny (as the ADL was so
reluctant to do when sued by
a host of individuals and organizations
for illegal spying upon them
in 1993). Especially interesting
would be to see how they act
in America as foreign agents
for Israel. A confessional to
kneel down and come clean to
the American people is always open to them.
"Deep in the files
of the State Department," notes
Catholic priest and sociologist
Andrew Greeley in 1997, "someone
found a dispatch from the 1940s
reporting a rumor that Nazi
money stolen from Jews had ended
up in the vaults at the Vatican.
B'nai B'rith, adopting the tone
of a prosecuting attorney, has
demanded access to Vatican archives
to determine whether the rumor
is true." [GREELEY, 1997, p.
B14] Greeley's newspaper editorial
was called "Cheap Shots at Catholic
Church."
For decades now, since
the "Holocaust," Jewish organizations
have been aggressively lobbying
the Catholic church for religious
concessions (and more). In a
1960s case, Jewish commentator
James Yaffe suggested concerted
Jewish intrigue:
"Much has been written
about Jewish influence on Vatican
II [changes in
formal Church
perspectives about Jews]: how
ADL and AJC both sent
lobbyists to
Rome; how Cardinal Cushing of
Boston set up an audience
with the Pope
for Rabbi Heschel and the Jewish
Theological Seminary;
how an audience
was granted to the wife of a
millionaire who had just
given a large
endowment to Pro Deo University;
how an audience was
granted was
to Ambassador Arthur Goldberg;
how Rabbi Tanenbaum
was the only
Jew left in the Vatican when
the statement as finally issued.
It's a good
story, a kind of theological
James Bond adventure." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p.
48]
In 1998, concerning
another concerted Jewish demand,
"in a long awaited apology,"
the Pope publicly proclaimed
regret for the "errors and failures"
of Roman Catholics during the
Holocaust era. "The apology,"
noted the Boston Herald,
"contained in a 12-page document
released in Rome yesterday wasn't
good enough for Jewish leaders
in Boston and around the world
who said the statement was 'too
little too late.'" [SULLIVAN,
p. 10] "It is ironic," wrote David Novak, himself
Jewish, "that the Pope should
be the focus of criticism, inasmuch
as there has been no other pontiff
in modern times, perhaps in
all history, who has done more
to develop a rapprochement with
the Jewish people and Judaism
... My own view is that the
Jewish response [to the Pope's
"apology"] is largely mistaken,
and that it reflects a misunderstanding
not only of Catholic theology
but of Jewish theology as well.
The Jewish leaders' reactions
were not just uncharitable,
they were also unjust." [NOVAK,
1999]
In 1992,
a similar concentrated Jewish
attack upon the entire nation
of (largely Catholic) France
was fielded by President Francois
Mitterand. The Jewish community
was pressuring the government
to issue a public apology for
anti-Semitism during World War
II. Mitterand refused. "The
issue," noted the (Montreal)
Gazette," is one of the
most emotional in modern France."
[GAZETTE, 7-15-92]
In 1999, on the occasion
of the Pope's visit to Israel,
the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz
began a story with the following,
reflecting the intense Jewish
antipathy towards Catholicism:
"It is important to
bear in mind that the extermination
of the Jews
during the Holocaust
was conceived and perpetrated
by Hitler,
not by the Catholic
Church. For Europeans, this
almost goes without
saying. In Israel
in recent years however, one
might have got a rather
different impression."
[CREMONESI, L., 3-22-2000]
In any of a myriad
of possible ways the Pope offends
the Jewish community. His 1987
crime? He met with Kurt Waldheim,
the head of the
United Nations who was
assailed by Jewish groups for
alleged Nazi connections during
World War II. When the Pope
later visited San Francisco,
local Jews found cause to march
in street demonstrations against
the Catholic leader. The local
left-wing Jewish magazine, Tikkun,
even took out ads in the local
media declaring that "The Catholic
Church has been responsible
for the deaths of more Jews
than the PLO [Palestinian Liberation
Organization]." [BIALE/ROSENBAUM,
p. 251] The chief rabbi, Robert Kirschner,
of San Francisco's oldest synagogue,
Temple Emanu-El, took the occasion
to preach an especially zealous
sermon about the "anti-Judaism"
of Catholicism. David Biale
and Fred Rosenbaum note the
immediate results of his anti-Christian
attack in the liberal San Francisco
community:
"Kirschner wept when
he learned of a specific case
in which a
Catholic woman, accompanying
her Jewish husband to the temple
for the first time,
became distraught upon hearing
the sermon and,
convinced that Jews
regularly preached hatred of
Christianity,
vowed never to return
to the synagogue again. Other
mixed couples
put letters under
his office door, informing him,
in several instances,
that his remarks had driven a wedge between
husband and wife."
[BIALE/ROSENBAUM,
p. 258]
A Jewish folk singer,
Hugh Blumenfeld, noted in 1999
American Jewish resistance to
even listen to a song of "whimsy"
he had written about Jesus:
"It's funny.
They had a great time with it
all through Israel. But
with an American
Jewish audience, sometimes all
you have to do
is say the word
'Jesus' and they go ballistic."
[KATZ-STONE, 1999, p.
47]
The Jewish resistance
to a mutually honest and open
dialogue between the two faiths runs deep in the Jewish
community; for Jews, "interfaith
dialogue" is simply Christian
theological concessions demanded
by Jewish attackers. Another
typical example of Jewish enmity
for Christians was Rabbi Barry
Cytron's disturbing experience
in a Minnesota-area Jewish-Christian
interfaith dialogue program
he helped to pioneer. The first
presentation, by Jewish and
Christian religious authorities,
was to a mostly Catholic, and
a minority Protestant, audience.
They, wrote Rabbi Cytron, "welcomed
the opportunity to hear our
thoughts. The questions they
asked were challenging and thought
provoking. Most of all, they
were gracious and hospitable."
The second interfaith presentation
was before a Jewish audience
whose mood "was not warm and
gracious, but cold and angry.
[They weren't] particularly
interested in dialogue ... Why
were they so angry? Why so unrelenting
in their view of Christianity?
Why so harsh in their judgments?"
[CYTRON, p. 11-12]
(Compare
this kind of widespread Jewish
animosity for Christianity with
Stanley Lippman's acceptance
as a computer programmer for
the Board of Global Ministries
of the World Methodist Church.
This organization even paid
for his further studies -- a
master's degree in computer
science. Lippman is today the
"principal software engineer"
at Walt Disney Studios. [SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH,
J., 7-20, 98] Can we imagine
a comparable openness to Gentile
employment in the heart of the
Jewish Theological Seminary,
which is only a few blocks away
in Manhattan from the Methodist
center?)
As Jewish author James
Yaffe noted in 1968:
"The Jew and the Christian
enter into dialogue for entirely
different
motives. The Christian
wants to learn more about Judaism
and
Jewish life. His sense
of guilt has made him dissatisfied
with his
present view of Christianity;
he hopes to find values in Judaism
which will help him
rethink his Christian ideas.
But the Jew's motive
is much simpler. He
wants Christian anti-Semitism
to come to an
end. He wants the
Christian to admit the harm
he's done and stop
doing it. He may not
be conscious that he has this
motive. He may
sincerely believe
that he has joined the dialogue
in order to
exchange ideas, broaden
his horizons, learn more about
Christianity.
But once the formalities
are over, anti-Semitism is the
only subject
he really wants to
discuss." [YAFFE, J., 1968,
p. 47]
This is the Jewish
polemic Walter Jacob noted about
the rival faith in 1974, in
his volume "Christianity Through
Jewish Eyes":
"Many [Jewish]
thinkers, and a host of minor
writers, preachers,
and essayists,
used the new found freedom from
the ghetto as an
opportunity
to vent their feelings against
the religion of the oppressor
... In Western
Europe, after Voltaire, almost
anything could be said
with impunity
... The beginnings of this Jewish
study of Christianity
were rather
angry, as if polemic were necessary
to arouse interest in
the problem
and the air had to be cleared
before a true discussion could
begin ... The
complacency of the Christian
majority had to be shaken
and Judaism
shown to be an equal, if not
superior, form of religion."
[JACOB, W.,
1974, p. 2]
Such Jewish attitudes
are long standing. And "angry"
Jewish polemics continues unabated.
A sympathetic book (The Nazarene)
by prominent Jewish author Sholem
Asch in the 1950s about Jesus
Christ even caused him to be
"isolated from a significant
portion of the American Jewish
intellectual establishment."
The ostracized work's crime,
notes Peter Goldsmith, was that
it was "an attempt to claim
a place for Jesus among figures
of Jewish inspiration." [GOLDSMITH,
P., p. 88]
In 1997 Oakland,
California's Catholic Holy Names
College (whose faculty, quite
liberally, is about 10% Jewish)
faced newsworthy controversy
when a number of Jewish faculty
members complained about a play
being produced on campus about
Edith Stein, a Jew who made
the decision to become a Catholic
nun in 1933 in Poland. Promotional
photographs for the play were
attacked for making the actress
playing Stein look "grim and
serious" as a Jew and happier
as a Catholic. "The pictures
sent a certain feeling through
me," said Martin Lampert, a
Jewish professor of psychology
at the college, they "could
be viewed as: Judaism isn't
the way to go but Christianity
is." [CAPLANE, p. 1a]
"Christmas,"
says popularly known Jewish
polemicist and lawyer, Alan
Dershowitz, "the most joyous
holiday to Christians, has been
among the most dreaded of days
throughout Jewish history ...
The nativity scene ... is not
a religious symbol ...; it is an
insult to the memory of the
many Jews for not accepting
the divine birth depicted in
the 'secular' nativity scene."
[DERSHOWITZ, CHUTZPAH, p. 332]
The idea that the nativity scene
is not a religious symbol is
of course strange news to the
millions of Christians who had
been thinking it was. As we
see here, and time and time
again, for the many Jews like
Dershowitiz (who pride themselves
on being "liberal," "open-minded,"
et al) being a Christian is
to be a virtual criminal, a
living "insult" to Jews.
Likewise there is
deep Jewish contempt for Easter,
the day Christians celebrate in commemoration of the resurrection
of Christ. When popular Jewish
theologian Emil Fackenheim thinks
of Easter, for instance, he
insists upon somehow seeing
Jewish dead bodies and Nazi
concentration camps; Christianity
is equated with German fascism:
"[Christianity's] greatest
celebration has unhappy memories
for Jews -- and, after Auschwitz,
for conscientious Christians
too." [FACKENHEIM, HOLO, p.
18] "Our [daughter] Kate," adds Jewish author
Ann Roiphe, "does not believe
in Christian charity (reports
of pogroms have caused her to
regard Easter as more than a
matter of bunnies and jelly
beans)." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 13]
In 1999, prominent author
Mary McCarthy took offense to
depictions of Christianity in
Philip Roth's novel The Counterlife.
"I'm not a Christian (I don't
believe in God)," she wrote
to him, "but to the extent that
I am and can't help being one
(just as a 'nice Jewish boy'
can't help being Jewish), I
bridle at your picture of Christianity.
There's more to Christmas trees,
that is, to the idea of Incarnation,
than Jew hatred ... I confess
that the crib with angels and
animals and a star is to me
a more sympathetic idea than
the Wailing Wall." [MCCARTHY,
p. 98]
In 1999, Eugene Fisher,
Associate Director of the Secretariat
for Ecumenical and Interreligious
Affairs of the National Conference
of Catholic Bishops, wrote with
concern about the continual
shrillness of Jewish attack
upon the Church:
"Many Catholics are
understandably confused as to
why some in
the Jewish community
feel constrained to second guess
so much of what
are, after all,
internal matters of the life
of the church ... Why beat up
Catholics all
the time. Why not go after somebody
else once and a
while? ... So
how is it that when we recognize
our American story in
the Jewish-American
story, many Jews seem to miss
what is to us
the obvious
point, that to attack the papacy
is to raise up for us the
specter of the
Nativist bigotry we thought
we had left behind after
John F. Kennedy's
campaign for the Presidency?
... If Jews are to
communicate
with American Catholics, there
will need to be a
softening of
the rhetoric until the volume
is turned down enough
so that we Catholics
can hear what they are saying.
Right now, the
